A retired teacher in Crowthorne was breaking up his father's old tower and found it would not start at all with one disk connected. Unplug the disk and the machine ran. On a powered dock the same drive showed nothing whatever. It is a 2006 Barracuda, and on it are scanned photographs going back to the 1950s and a music library nobody else has a copy of.
| Media | A Seagate Barracuda from 2006, pulled out of a family tower. Connected, it prevents the computer starting; on a powered dock at 12V it shows no sign of life at all. |
| What was reported | Seagate Barracuda, 2006 vintage, PC refuses to start while the drive is attached, no life on a powered dock, scanned family photographs and a music library on it, recovery wanted. |
| Fault class | Electronic. A component on the drive's own board had failed short, dragging the supply rail down hard enough to stop the power supply coming up at all. The mechanism and the platters were undamaged. |
| On the bench | Board examined under a stereo microscope, the short traced by current draw on a current-limited bench supply until the failed part was identified, the fault repaired and the drive's own ROM retained so its factory calibration went with it, powered up under supervision, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, filesystem parsed in R-Studio and the photographs proved by rendering rather than by file count. |
A drive that stops a computer starting is not a mysterious fault; it is an electrical one. Power supplies protect themselves. Present one with a dead short on the 5V or 12V rail and it will refuse to come up rather than burn. The disk was the short. Everything the tower did afterwards was the supply behaving exactly as designed.
The dock told the same story from the other end. No light, no spin, no draw worth the name: a board that is shorting will take the supply down wherever it is plugged in. Two symptoms, one cause, and neither of them says anything about the platters.
Board faults and platter faults are unrelated problems that happen to live in the same box. The board is a small computer that runs the mechanism. When it dies, it stops the mechanism from being used, but it does not reach through and damage what is stored. Twenty years of scanned photographs sat unaffected on the other side of the fault.
The ROM is the part people get wrong. A board carries adaptive data unique to the drive it was fitted to. Bolt on a replacement board from another drive of the same model and it will spin and then read gibberish, because it is calibrated for someone else's mechanism. That chip has to move across, or the repair has to be done on the original board, which is what happened here.
The board was inspected under the microscope and then fed from a current-limited supply, which lets a short reveal itself by where the current goes rather than by what burns. The failed component was identified, removed and replaced, and the original board went back on the drive with its own ROM in place, so the calibration was never in question.
Powered under supervision, the drive spun and readied normally, which confirmed the mechanism had been sitting behind an electrical wall rather than a mechanical one. It was imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA. R-Studio read the volume out of the image, and a spread of the scanned photographs was rendered on screen to prove them rather than trusting a directory listing.
The photographs came back whole, the music library with them, and the tower started again the moment the repaired drive was reconnected. He had assumed a drive old enough to vote was beyond help; age had nothing to do with it.
The price for a single drive is £300 + VAT whatever its year. Board repair is electronic work, which the published exclusion names, so the guarantee did not apply: 50% was taken upfront and the balance fell due only once the recovered files were confirmed.
Take it out and leave it out. A shorting drive can stress the power supply it is attached to, and there is nothing to be gained by proving the symptom twice. Do not put it in a dock or a caddy either, because the short travels with the drive and a cheap dock offers less protection than a tower's supply does. Above all, do not buy a second-hand board of the same model and fit it. Boards carry calibration data belonging to their original drive, and a mismatched one usually turns a repairable fault into a much longer job. Unplug it, pack it, send it, and let the diagnostic name the component.
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 bent socket is a repairable joint, and unlabelled drives are read one at a time rather than guessed at
Liquid travels down and inwards, so the storage has to be assessed on its own rather than assumed innocent
A drive taken out and replaced can still be read as a data device once it is out of the machine it was failing in
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.