A family in Martins Heron had their drive out of a drawer, clicking away, popping up a message asking them to reformat it every time it was connected. Twenty years of photographs are on it: two children from birth to university. It was sitting with another company while they worked out whether they could afford the figure they had been given, and they rang here to ask what this bench would charge and whether the price depended on how bad it was.
| Media | An external hard drive that clicks continuously and produces a prompt asking for it to be reformatted whenever it is connected. It holds twenty years of family photographs. |
| What was reported | External hard drive, clicking, prompting to be reformatted, twenty years of family photographs on it, currently with another company, owners comparing prices and asking whether the figure changes with the severity. |
| Fault class | Mechanical. The clicking was a head stack failing to read, and the reformat prompt was the direct consequence: a computer that cannot read the front of a drive concludes there is no usable structure and offers the only remedy it knows. |
| On the bench | Not run and never formatted, profiled once on a current-limited bench supply, opened in clean air under laminar flow, heads and all surfaces inspected under a stereo microscope with any marking mapped, matched donor heads fitted and alignment set, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, the volume parsed in R-Studio and photographs validated by rendering them as contact sheets. |
Two symptoms, one cause, and the noisy one is the real one. The heads cannot read, which is the clicking. Because they cannot read, the machine gets nothing back when it asks for the volume's structure, so it concludes the drive is unformatted and offers to fix that. The prompt is downstream of the noise.
Accepting the prompt on a clicking drive achieves nothing and costs everything. A format needs to write, and a drive that cannot read generally cannot write either, so most of the time the attempt fails partway. What it can do is damage what structure remains, and it will certainly involve minutes of a damaged head stack running across the surface.
The pricing question deserved a straight answer. Any single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT here, and that figure does not move once it has been quoted. It does not rise because the fault turns out to be worse than expected, and it does not rise because donor parts are needed. What varies between jobs is whether the answer is yes or no, not what the yes costs.
Shopping around is reasonable and it has a hidden cost. The drive is not deteriorating while it sits on a shelf, so taking a week to decide harms nothing. What harms it is being plugged in for another demonstration each time somebody wants to see the fault for themselves.
It arrived and was not connected to a computer at any point. One profiled start on a current-limited supply confirmed a head stack retracting and retrying, and the drive was opened under laminar flow rather than asked again.
Under magnification two heads were worn and one surface carried a light band of marking, consistent with a drive that had been powered a number of times while clicking. The marked region was mapped, matched donor heads were fitted and alignment set, and imaging on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA took the clean surfaces first and the marked band last. R-Studio read the volume out of the image and the photographs were rendered into contact sheets so the family could see what had come back before they were asked for anything.
Just under ninety-eight per cent of the photographs came back, and the missing part was named by folder and by year rather than reported as a percentage: a stretch of one summer holiday from twelve years ago. The rest, including everything from both children's early years, was complete.
One drive, £300 + VAT, quoted before the work and unchanged after it. The drive was opened in clean air, which is mechanical work outside the guarantee, so 50% was payable upfront and the balance only once the contact sheets had been checked.
Say no to the prompt and unplug it. The two symptoms are one fault, and the noise is the one that matters: every connection is another spell of damaged heads passing over the photographs. Do not let anyone plug it in to have a look, however well meant. When you are comparing quotations, ask three questions: what the figure is, whether it can change afterwards, and what happens if nothing comes back. A drive sitting unpowered on a shelf while you decide is not getting worse, so take the time you need. What you cannot get back is surface condition spent on demonstrations.
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
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
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.