A student in Crowthorne with resits three weeks off knocked her laptop off the arm of a chair. It carried on working for the rest of the evening, which everybody in the house took as proof that it had got away with it. The next morning it would not start, and the drive clicked when it was plugged into a caddy. On it were two years of notes and a dissertation draft.
| Media | A 2.5-inch drive out of a laptop that fell a short distance and kept working for several hours before failing. It now clicks when powered and presents nothing. |
| What was reported | Laptop dropped a short distance, kept working for a few hours afterwards, then failed, drive now clicks when connected, two years of notes and a dissertation needed, examinations in three weeks. |
| Fault class | Mechanical, from the fall. The impact damaged the head stack without destroying it outright, so the drive continued to function until the damage progressed far enough to stop it reading. The delay is characteristic rather than unusual. |
| On the bench | Not run after arrival, profiled once on a current-limited bench supply with the click interval recorded, opened in clean air under laminar flow, heads and surfaces inspected under a stereo microscope with any marking mapped, matched donor heads fitted and alignment set, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA with the coursework partition taken first, the volume parsed in R-Studio and the dissertation validated by opening it. |
The hours in between are the most misleading part of this fault. An impact can bend a head or damage a slider without stopping the drive. It carries on reading, slightly worse than before, until either the damaged part fails properly or it makes contact with the surface. A delay of hours or days is common and it fools nearly everybody.
Working afterwards is not evidence of having got away with it. It is evidence that the damage was partial. The right response to a drop, even one that appears to have done nothing, is to copy off anything irreplaceable immediately and then stop using the drive until you know.
Putting it in a caddy was the wrong instinct at the wrong moment. Once it had started clicking, each further attempt to reach the files spent surface condition on nothing. It was two attempts, not twenty, which is why this one still had a good ceiling.
Deadlines change the order of work, not the method. With examinations three weeks off, the imaging was ordered to take the partition holding her documents first, so that the important part was secured before anything else was attempted. That costs nothing and it is worth asking for.
The drive arrived out of the laptop and was not powered. One profiled start on a current-limited supply confirmed a head stack that was retracting and retrying without ever settling, and established the click interval for comparison afterwards.
Opened under laminar flow, one head showed clear impact damage and a second showed wear from the hours of use that followed. Both surfaces carried a faint mark in one narrow band, which was mapped. Matched donor heads were fitted, alignment set, and DeepSpar imaged the documents partition first, then the rest, with the marked band left until last on a restricted head map. R-Studio parsed the volume from the image and the dissertation was opened rather than merely listed.
Notes, coursework and the dissertation all came back, with the marked band costing a handful of installed application files and nothing of hers. It went back to her four working days after the parcel arrived, in time for the resits.
One drive, £300 + VAT. It had to be opened in clean air, which is mechanical work and is named in the published exclusion, so 50% was payable upfront with the balance once the dissertation had been opened and checked.
Copy what matters off straight away, in one pass, to something else. That is the entire window and it can close within hours. Do not defragment, do not run a disk check and do not install anything, because all three make the drive read and write across the whole surface at exactly the moment it can least afford it. If it has already started clicking, stop: no caddy, no second machine, no overnight recovery scan. Take the drive out and send it, and say if you have a deadline, because the order in which an image is taken can be arranged around what you need first even though the price and the timescale do not change.
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 taken out and replaced can still be read as a data device once it is out of the machine it was failing in
Heads fly closer to the platter than a speck of dust is wide, so the drop does not have to be dramatic
When the machine, the cable and the caddy have all been eliminated, what is left is the drive itself
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.