A picture framer in Maidenhead photographs every commission before it leaves the workshop, twenty years of them, all on one Samsung M3. She caught the drive with her elbow and it went off the bench onto a tiled floor. It had not even been plugged in. Since then it powers up, clicks steadily, and shows nothing at all.
| Media | A Samsung M3 portable drive knocked off a workbench onto tiles while switched off. It now takes power, clicks continuously and presents no readable volume. |
| What was reported | Samsung M3 portable drive, knocked off a bench onto a tiled floor, not powered at the time, now has power but nothing readable and a steady clicking noise, twenty years of commission photography on it. |
| Fault class | Mechanical. The impact knocked the head stack out of true. Being switched off at the time made no difference, because the damage is physical and the heads are just as vulnerable parked as flying. |
| On the bench | Not run on arrival, profiled once on a current-limited bench supply with the click interval measured, opened in clean air under laminar flow, heads and both platter surfaces inspected under a stereo microscope for scoring, matched donor heads fitted and alignment set, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, images located in R-Studio and validated by rendering. |
Clicking is a search that keeps failing. On start-up the heads go looking for the servo marks that tell them their position. If they cannot resolve those marks they retract and repeat, and that retract is the click you hear. A drive stuck in that loop never gets far enough to describe itself, which is why nothing appears.
Being switched off does not protect a drive from a fall. People expect it to, and the expectation is reasonable, because a parked head is off the data area. But the arm, the suspension and the head sliders are delicate whether they are moving or not, and a hard floor does not distinguish. A parked drive that is dropped can land with its heads bent exactly as a running one can.
Every subsequent power-up spends something. Misaligned heads dragged across a platter can polish away the magnetic layer they are supposed to be reading. That is the mechanism by which a recoverable drive becomes an unrecoverable one, and it is the only real risk the owner controls.
Twenty years of photographs are not fragile in the way people assume. Nothing fades off a platter with age. The question was never whether the images were still there, only whether the surfaces beneath the damaged heads were still clean.
It was not run. A single profiled start on a current-limited supply established the click interval and the current signature, both of which pointed at the head stack rather than the spindle, and that was the last time it was asked to do anything outside clean air.
Opened under laminar flow, the head stack showed the deformation the fall had caused. Both surfaces were inspected across their full radius and came back unscored, which is what set the ceiling for the job at everything rather than something. Matched donor heads were fitted, alignment was set, and the drive imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA. The photographs were located in R-Studio and a spread of them rendered on screen, because a file that opens is proof and a file that merely exists is not.
Twenty years of commission photographs came back in full, with the folder structure she had built them in intact. She has been advised, gently, that a second copy of a twenty-year archive is not an extravagance.
A single drive is £300 + VAT. The drive had to be opened, which is mechanical work and sits outside the guarantee, so 50% was payable upfront and the rest only once she had the images in front of her.
Leave it unplugged. The most common way people lose a dropped drive is by testing it repeatedly to see whether it has settled down, and each test drags damaged heads across the surface holding the files. Recovery software cannot help, because software talks to the disk through the same heads that cannot read, and it also cannot hurt for the same reason. Power is what hurts. Do not shake it, do not freeze it, and do not open it. Pack it so it cannot move inside the box, say roughly when and onto what it fell, and post it. Whether the surfaces were spared is the whole question, and the free diagnostic answers it.
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 drive that announces itself to the port but never appears has a mechanism stuck short of ready
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.