Portable drives · bench record · PLY-2025-0308
It Landed Once, and After That Only Ticked.
Nothing anywhere else held a copy. Months earlier the delivered JPEGs had been handed over to the couples and wiped from the laptop to free space, which left two full wedding seasons on a single portable drive. It slid out of a bag nobody had zipped and hit a driveway in Saltash. Since then it ticks half a dozen times, then shuts up
, and the blue light comes on and nothing else does
. What sat on it: every raw frame off two summers of weddings
.
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Why it happens.
Every platter carries servo marks written onto it at the factory, and a head reads those marks to work out which track it is over. Knock the stack out of true and what comes back is noise. The arm sweeps across, recognises none of it, backs off to the park ramp, and starts over. The tick is that circle repeating. The light settles nothing either way, since it comes on whenever the USB board has power, sound mechanism or ruined one. He powered it up once more, watched the same performance, and then left it switched off. Leaving it switched off is the reason the archive still exists.
The kit this job called for.
How the job runs →| The kit | What it did here | Why we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Scored every head before reading, which pushed the poor surface to the end of the order | Scores every head before it starts, works one surface at a time, and holds resets, timeouts and power in check |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Once the replacement stack was fitted, imaged it zone by zone from the firmware down | The PC-3000 runs the copy through the drive's own firmware |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Put the exFAT volume back together off the image and opened each CR3 | Mounts what other software will not: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs volumes |
How it ran.
Rubber off, bridge out, a plain SATA disk
Peel the rubber sleeve away, unplug the little USB board, and you are holding an ordinary 2.5in SATA unit — one of thousands, distinguished only by the driveway. Bench power puts the spinning under our control. Nothing turns unless somebody has a reason to turn it, rather than because a computer somewhere has decided to go looking.
Donor stack fitted, and a survey ahead of any reading
Same drive family, same firmware revision — that was the donor. Fitted with its stack, the patient returned its own identity. Still no reading. First came a survey, clocking each head and marking it for the cleanliness of whatever it pulled back, so this particular disk dictated the order rather than some standard recipe. One head stayed steady throughout. The other was slow and kept tripping over itself, and its platter therefore went to the back.
The sound surface first, the unreliable one last
Reading began on the good side with short timeouts and a power cycle at every stall. Most of the archive was therefore already taken before anybody asked the weaker head to do a thing. Its platter came last, at whatever pace it cared to give. Bench to sign-off, six days. When a drive has met a driveway, going slowly is not a concession — it is the only route to the end of the job.
How it ended up.
Nothing went out of the door until each CR3 had been opened and drawn on a monitor. A filename sitting in a listing is worth nothing to a photographer if the picture behind it refuses to render. The set travelled home on fresh media, and a duplicate was written to a second drive that same afternoon. Those two seasons are now held twice over rather than once.
Pages people open after this.
Other cases from the pocket-drive file.
Seeing the same thing?
Leave it switched off and post it in. Nothing happens until the diagnosis, which lists what can still be read and what cannot.