An independent letting agent in Wokingham keeps ten years of tenancies on one 1TB Seagate: inventories, check-out photographs, deposit correspondence. Windows kept insisting something was plugged in and then offering nothing behind it. It says connected, but the drive is not found, she wrote, and there was a faint noise each time the lead went in. It travelled by post, because there is nothing in Bracknell to hand a drive over at.
| Media | A 1TB Seagate external carrying ten years of tenancy paperwork, inventories and check-out photography. The machine reports a device attached; no volume ever appears. |
| What was reported | Seagate 1TB external, stopped working, Windows says connected but no drive is found, a faint noise each time the lead is plugged in, ten years of letting records wanted back. |
| Fault class | Mechanical. Power was reaching the drive and its interface was answering, which is what the machine could see, but the mechanism never reached ready, so there was no volume for it to show. |
| On the bench | Left unpowered on arrival, lifted out of its caddy, profiled on a current-limited bench supply with the spin-up traced rather than repeated, opened in clean air under laminar flow, head stack and platter surfaces examined under a stereo microscope, matched donor heads fitted and alignment set, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, the NTFS volume parsed in R-Studio and a sample of files from each year opened to prove them. |
Connected and found are two separate claims, and only one of them was true. The plastic box around a portable drive contains a bridge chip whose job is to translate USB into the language the disk speaks. That bridge had power and was answering, so the machine logged an attachment. Behind it the disk never finished starting, so there was nothing to attach to.
The faint noise carried the diagnosis. A healthy drive starts, settles and goes quiet. This one made a short attempt each time and then stopped attempting. That pattern belongs to a mechanism that cannot complete its start-up, which in practice means the heads or the motor, and neither of those is a fault a computer can describe in words.
Swapping leads and machines proves less than people hope. She had tried three computers and two cables before writing in, which was sensible and which told her nothing, because a bridge that answers will answer on any machine. What separates the bridge from the disk is taking the disk out of the box, and that is bench work.
None of this touches the files. A drive that cannot start has not lost anything. The tenancy records were exactly where they had been written, on platters that had never been read badly, waiting for a head stack capable of reading them.
It arrived unpowered and stayed that way. The disk came out of the caddy and went onto a current-limited supply so the start-up could be watched once, in detail, instead of being repeated. The current trace matched a head fault rather than a seized spindle, and the caddy itself was set aside as innocent.
The drive was opened under laminar flow. Under magnification the head stack was clearly worn on one side and the surfaces beneath it were unmarked, which is the good version of this fault. Matched donor heads were fitted, alignment was set, and the drive was imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA. R-Studio read the NTFS volume out of the image, and files from each of the ten years were opened rather than counted.
Everything came back: inventories, photographs, the deposit correspondence she had been most worried about. The empty caddy went home in the same box, since it had never been the problem.
A single drive is £300 + VAT. Opening a sealed drive is physical work and the published guarantee does not extend to it, so 50% was settled before the lid came off and the remainder once she had checked the recovered folders herself.
Stop plugging it in. Each attempt is another start-up, and if the heads are the problem then start-ups are precisely the currency you cannot spend. Trying more computers will not narrow anything down, because the part answering the computer is not the part that has failed. Leave the caddy at home, pack the drive so it cannot shift, and send it. The diagnostic closes two working days after it is booked in and tells you which of the mechanism, the electronics and the firmware you are dealing with, with a fixed figure attached.
These files are written up from genuine enquiries taken from households and businesses in Bracknell, across Berkshire and Surrey and into London, with names, firms and anything else identifying stripped out. Each one sets down how the fault was reasoned through, the method it actually needed and the equipment it was worked on. One of them is a job that was turned away, which belongs here as much as the rest of them.
A fall damages heads mechanically whether the drive was running or not, and the clicking is the proof
Clicking gets worse with use, and the fortnight between the first noise and the last is spent, not free
A lit indicator proves power and nothing else, and a shop that has already bypassed the caddy has narrowed the job usefully
Examining it is free and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure goes to you in writing and does not move afterwards, and a logical fault carries no fix, no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.