Portable drives · job record · PLY-2025-0625
Named by the BIOS. Windows Freezes.
Nine years of paperwork lived on one external drive belonging to a drainage contractor in St Austell — scanned receipts, VAT workings, invoices — and an accountant had spent a year chasing a set of year-end figures stuck on it. The boot screen picks it up with no trouble at all
, he told us. Then Windows comes up, and the whole thing stops dead until I unplug it
.
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Why it happens.
They're not lying about anything. What's happening here is simply that they want two completely different types of information. The BIOS wants three pieces of information: the model number, capacity, and a couple of other parameters. Any device that has a motor that runs and can communicate with its own controller can provide the BIOS with this type of information. Windows however wants what is on the disk: the partition table first, the file system records next, and finally sector by sector while meeting a deadline measured in fractions of a second. Pass this deadline and the drive is dropped. Make it through the first problem and fall down at the second, and you have failed at the one thing that your drive is designed to do. There are essentially two reasons that cover most of it. Either the firmware gives up as soon as someone starts asking for user data, or the media is so badly worn that reads continue to exceed the allotted time.
The equipment needed for this job.
How the job runs →| The kit | Where it came in | Why we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Answered the one question everything else depends on: firmware or worn media | Drops the disk into its maker's service mode, out of reach over plain ATA |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Copied the disk with timeouts opened right out and no clock running | The PC-3000 runs the copy through the drive's own firmware |
| R-Studio Technician | Once the image was finished, reassembled the NTFS volume from it | Reads nearly every file system, and rebuilds RAID sets from images |
How it ran.
Settle which of the two it is before it turns again
The firmware was perfectly sound. Its service area read back without difficulty and every module was present. Reading was where it failed. Sectors did emerge, singly, several seconds apart. That accounts for the symptom entirely: Windows allows a good deal less than a second per sector, and once that is gone it stops waiting.
Copy it with no clock running
Windows does not tolerate a slow drive. A bench imager has nothing but time, and that is basically the entire difference between them. As long as the disk continues to answer, the imager will keep asking. To allow more time to complete the imaging process, the timeouts were opened right out, stalls were cleared using measured resets, and the read rate was allowed to drop to whatever rate the worn areas could give. It took several days to image the entire disk.
Everything after that happens on the image
The completed image contained the partition table and the NTFS structures, and therefore all of the volume information. We were able to rebuild the original volume from this information. After weeks of being locked out, everything opened up at the first try: ledgers, invoices, receipts.
The way it turned out.
One worn band hung on to its sectors right to the end. This band contained scanned copies of a few receipts, and those were all that was lost. Every other item survived, including all the invoices and all the VAT workbooks, and nine years of records were returned to St Austell on a new drive.
Pages people open after this.
Other cases from the pocket-drive file.
Seeing the same thing?
Don't turn it on. Get your quote, then post it in as it is. No work happens until the diagnosis determines what can still be read from the drive and what cannot be read from it.