The secretary of a rowing club in Henley-on-Thames wrote in a year after the event, still slightly disbelieving. The club laptop had slid off a low table onto a carpeted floor, a fall of perhaps two feet onto something soft, and the drive in it had never worked since. Thirty years of race results, membership records and boat maintenance logs were on it. His question was less about recovery than about physics: how could that possibly have been enough.
| Media | A 2.5-inch drive out of a five-year-old laptop that slid a short distance from a low table onto carpet. The drive has not worked since; the laptop has been unused for a year. |
| What was reported | Five-year-old laptop dropped a short distance from a low table onto soft carpet about a year ago, hard drive broken since, battery never charged again, owner asking how so short a fall could break it, club records wanted. |
| Fault class | Mechanical, from the impact. The fall was enough to knock the head stack out of true, which is unremarkable at the tolerances involved. The platters were unmarked, having been spared a year of further attempts. |
| On the bench | Removed by the owner and sent alone, not powered on arrival, profiled once on a current-limited bench supply, opened in clean air under laminar flow, head stack and surfaces inspected under a stereo microscope, matched donor heads fitted and alignment set, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, the volume parsed in R-Studio, spreadsheets and documents validated by opening them. |
The numbers are the answer to his question. A read head flies above the platter at a height measured in single-digit nanometres, which is a small fraction of the width of a human hair and less than the diameter of a smoke particle. Nothing else in a household is built to that clearance. A jolt that a phone or a book would shrug off is, at that scale, an enormous event.
Soft carpet helps less than it sounds. Carpet spreads the deceleration over a few more milliseconds, which is worth something. It does not change the fact that the arm and the head sliders have almost no mass and almost no tolerance, and a two-foot fall still delivers a shock of tens of g at the point of landing.
The year of doing nothing was, accidentally, the right decision. Because nobody kept trying it, the heads were never dragged across the surfaces. That is why the platters came out of this unmarked and why the recovery was complete rather than partial.
The dead battery and the unused laptop are beside the point. The drive is read on its own equipment. Whether the machine it came out of ever starts again has no bearing on the job, and a laptop that no longer powers is not an obstacle so long as somebody takes the drive out of it.
It arrived out of the machine, which is how it should arrive, and it was not powered on receipt. A single profiled start on a current-limited supply gave a current signature and a stall consistent with a head fault, and no further attempt was made outside clean air.
Opened under laminar flow, the head stack showed the geometry of an impact: one head visibly out of line with its neighbour. Both surfaces were inspected across the full radius and were unmarked. Matched donor heads went in, alignment was set, and the drive imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA. R-Studio read the volume from the image and the results spreadsheets were opened rather than counted.
Thirty years of race results came back, along with membership records, maintenance logs and a folder of photographs going back to the club's centenary. The delay had cost nothing, which is not usually the case and was worth saying.
One drive, £300 + VAT. The drive was opened in clean air, which is mechanical work and sits outside the guarantee, so 50% was payable upfront with the balance falling due once the club had checked the files.
Do not test it repeatedly to see whether it has recovered. A dropped drive either works or it does not, and the testing itself is what turns the second case into a permanent one. If the machine still starts, copy what matters off immediately in one pass and then stop using it, because a drive damaged by an impact often works for a while before it does not. If it does not start, leave it alone rather than reinstalling anything or letting an automatic repair run. There is no time limit on this: a drive that has sat for a year with a head fault is in exactly the condition it was in on day one. What ages badly is not the data; it is the number of times somebody has tried.
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
When the machine, the cable and the caddy have all been eliminated, what is left is the drive itself
Where the flash is soldered flat to the mainboard there is no unit to send, and saying so at the enquiry costs nothing
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.