Desktop externals · case log · PLY-2025-0334
The One Making the Noise Could Wait.
A holiday-letting agency on St Mary’s, in the Isles of Scilly, closed one of its offices and sent both drives in a single parcel. The Iomega had spent years in a stationery cupboard and came out to make a final copy of the archive. It got nowhere near the end — about ten minutes into a folder and it vanishes
— which everybody had blamed on how old it must be by now
. The Seagate was the younger drive of the pair. It was sitting on a filing cabinet when a removals trolley clipped it, and ever since it clicks, and clicks, and does nothing else
, while no machine in the office picks it up
.
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Why it happens.
Judging the two by how much noise they made would have put them in the wrong order. A knock that destroys a head stack is a fault that has already finished happening: the heads cannot get to the platters, and time on a shelf will not add to that — four weeks on, the Seagate would have been exactly as it arrived. The urgent one was the Iomega, and it was urgent because it was still partly working. Reading had slowed to below the speed a USB bridge will wait for, so Windows gave up midway through every copy, and each power-up handed over a few more sectors permanently. A noise tells you a drive has failed. What it does not tell you is which drive to open first.
The kit this job called for.
How the job runs →| The kit | What it did here | Why we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Ran the Seagate after its transplant: map first, then take the best surfaces early | Scores every head before it starts, works one surface at a time, and holds resets, timeouts and power in check |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | One pass over the Iomega, each stall limited, timed and written down | The PC-3000 runs the copy through the drive's own firmware |
| R-Studio Technician | Put both folder trees back together from the completed images | Reads nearly every file system, and rebuilds RAID sets from images |
How it ran.
The fault sets the order of work, not the noise
Coming out of the same parcel bought neither drive any precedence; the fault decided each one’s place. With no power on it, the Seagate a month from now is the drive that came out of the wrapping, so nothing was lost by asking it to wait. The Iomega had no margin of that kind. Every hour it spent switched on took sectors off it for good. So the Iomega took the bench, and the Seagate waited on a shelf.
Begin with the Iomega and keep going
Because each stall was costing surface, stalls were kept on a strict allowance: every read got a short fixed budget, and anything that ran past it was noted, abandoned for the moment and returned to on a later, gentler pass. The drive stayed on the bus throughout and no pass had to be started again. What had beaten the office turned into a list of ranges left for later, and the copy moved along at a steady rate.
Then the Seagate: donor heads, no hurry
Nothing at all was coming off the Seagate before its head stack was changed. A matched donor set was fitted under laminar flow, with every head checked on the bench ahead of any reading. One platter surface had been scored by the knock. The others read cleanly and gave up all they held; the scored one returned a portion of its contents.
How it ended up.
It finished the opposite way round to the office’s own reading. The Iomega, the drive they had stopped hoping for, came back very nearly complete. What was missing sat on the Seagate: that one scored band, and the owner records that were on it, named one by one in the report rather than reduced to a percentage. Fresh media went back to St Mary’s by post, as everything does.
Pages people open after this.
Also tagged: desk drives.
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.