A freelance translator in Twickenham was doing two things at once: copying a finished job off an old 500GB Samsung S2 and copying a new one on. The lead caught on the edge of the desk. The drive still turns up as D: and Windows still lists it, but nothing on it opens, and the folder holding eighteen months of glossaries and delivered work reads as empty.
| Media | A Samsung S2 500GB external, in use for years, disconnected during a two-way transfer. It enumerates and takes a drive letter, but the volume cannot be read. |
| What was reported | Samsung S2 500GB external drive, copying to and from it simultaneously, lead pulled out mid-transfer, still shows as D: but nothing can be read, eighteen months of translation work needed. |
| Fault class | Logical. The interrupted write left the filesystem's records disagreeing with each other, so the volume enumerates and mounts but cannot be interpreted. The disk surface and the mechanism were both sound. |
| On the bench | Read behind a hardware write blocker with every repair prompt refused, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, the filesystem parsed in R-Studio from the image, the inconsistency introduced by the interrupted write reconciled against the journal, orphaned files carved by content where their references were gone, everything validated and written to fresh media. |
Two transfers at once is two chances to be interrupted. A filesystem does not write a file in one motion. It writes the data, then updates its records, and for a fraction of a second those two things disagree. Cut power in that window and the disagreement is permanent, which is what a corrupted volume actually is.
The drive letter surviving is a good sign, not a red herring. Enumerating means the disk is healthy enough to introduce itself, the electronics work and the partition entry still exists. The damage is one layer up, in the bookkeeping, and bookkeeping can be reconstructed.
What must not happen is a live repair. Windows will offer to check and fix the volume, and that offer is genuinely dangerous here: the repair writes its conclusions straight onto the disk, and where it guesses wrongly it discards the entries it could not understand. On a job with no second copy that is a bet with no upside.
The right order is copy first, then think. An image is a frozen version of the disk that can be reasoned about, undone and re-tried as often as needed. Every subsequent decision was made against that copy while the original sat untouched in a drawer.
It went straight behind a hardware write blocker, which meant that neither Windows nor anything else could accept the invitation to repair it. The surface read cleanly at full speed, so the imaging was uneventful and took one pass on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA.
R-Studio parsed the volume out of the image. The journal still held enough to show which transactions had been left half-finished, and reconciling those brought the directory tree back. A small number of files caught in the interrupted copy had lost their references and were recovered by content instead. Everything was opened and checked before being written to fresh media.
The glossaries came back complete, as did the delivered work and, awkwardly, both halves of the transfer that had been running when the lead caught. She now copies in one direction at a time.
One drive, £300 + VAT. Nothing here needed opening, soldering or a donor part, so it fell inside no fix, no fee and was billed only after she had confirmed the files.
Do not plug it back in to see whether it recovered on its own. Modern filesystems keep a journal and will try to replay it on the next mount, which usually helps and occasionally makes a partial write permanent. If it is already mounting and showing nothing, that is the moment to stop, not the moment to run a repair tool. Refuse the check-disk offer, refuse the format offer, unplug it and send it. Imaging first means every rebuild attempt happens on a copy, and no attempt can make the situation worse than it already is.
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.
Windows reporting a healthy device is a statement about hardware and says nothing about the filesystem on it
One device reading a drive and another refusing it points at the filesystem rather than at the hardware
A single bad partition on a drive whose other partitions still work is a structure fault, and deleting the table is not the fix
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.