An accountancy practice in Market Harborough keeps one elderly laptop alive because a tax package they still need for older client files will not run on anything newer. It began clicking one afternoon, went slower and slower, and by the following morning would get no further than a bare startup screen reporting that there was no hard drive present. The senior partner had heard that you should not move a running machine, and wanted to know whether carrying it between desks had caused it.
| Media | A 2.5-inch drive out of an ageing office laptop, which clicked for a day and then disappeared from the machine altogether, leaving a startup screen that reports no disk installed. |
| What was reported | Laptop stopped loading, began clicking shortly before it failed, now reports that it cannot find a hard drive, client files and a legacy accounts package on it, recovery sought. |
| Fault class | Mechanical. The head stack had degraded to the point where it could no longer read the reserved area holding the drive's own configuration, so the drive never completed its start-up and never answered the machine that was asking what it was. |
| On the bench | Removed from the laptop and left unpowered, profiled once on a current-limited bench supply with the click period timed and the current trace kept, opened under laminar flow with heads and both surfaces examined under a stereo microscope, matched donor heads fitted from a drive of the same family and alignment set, the reserved area read first and the configuration verified, then imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA and the accounts data parsed from the image in R-Studio and opened before release. |
A machine that says there is no disk is often looking straight at one. Before anything appears in a startup screen, the drive has to read a reserved region of its own platters that holds its model, its capacity and its defect tables, and then report all of that back. A head stack that cannot read cannot complete that step, so from the machine's point of view nothing ever answered and the correct thing to display is nothing.
The day of clicking was the drive telling them in advance. Clicking is the head assembly moving out to a reference position and back because the read attempt failed. While enough of the reserved region was still legible the laptop kept working, badly and slowly, each pause being a retry. When that region finally went, the symptom flipped from slow to absent, which reads like a sudden failure and is really the end of a gradual one.
Carrying it about did not cause this, though it does not help. Heads fly at a height measured in nanometres, so a hard knock while running can certainly put them onto the surface. But a drive that degrades over a day, with clicking that gets worse rather than starting all at once, is showing wear rather than impact, and this one had a wear pattern under the microscope and no impact marks. The advice is still sound; it just was not the cause here.
Everything the practice needed was on the platters and none of it was in the head. The reading mechanism and the recorded data are separate things. Replacing one does not touch the other, which is why a head fault over intact surfaces is among the most routine work a lab does, however alarming it sounds from the desk it happened at.
The laptop stayed in Leicestershire; only the disk was posted, which is what the shipping guidance asks for and saves a machine being stripped twice. It was profiled once on a current-limited supply. The click period was regular and the current trace showed a spindle running properly beneath a head stack that was achieving nothing, which points at the heads rather than the motor.
Opened under laminar flow, one head showed clear wear and the surfaces below were scuffed in a narrow band near the reserved region and clean everywhere else. Matched donor heads were fitted and alignment set, and the reserved area was read first to confirm the configuration had survived. Imaging then ran on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, deferring the scuffed band and returning to it slowly on a restricted head map. R-Studio parsed the volume from the image and the accounts files were opened in the package that wrote them.
The client files came back in full and the legacy package's own data folder with them, which was the part the practice had privately expected to lose. The scuffed band held part of an operating system installation and nothing the practice had written.
One disk is £300 + VAT. Head replacement means opening the drive, which is mechanical work and outside the published guarantee, so 50% was payable upfront and the remainder after the partner had checked the recovered files himself.
Leave it switched off. A drive that has stopped being detected has usually lost the ability to read its own configuration area, and every further start-up drags a failing head across the region that holds it. Do not install anything, do not let the machine attempt a repair install, and do not put the disk into a caddy to see whether another computer has better luck, because the fault is inside the drive and the second computer will be told the same nothing. Take the disk out and send that on its own rather than posting the whole laptop; the bench cannot use the rest of the machine and stripping one is ten minutes' work for any local repairer.
Each of these is a real enquiry, taken from a household or a business somewhere in Leicester or the surrounding county, with the name of the customer, the firm and anything else that would identify them taken out. What is left is the reasoning: what turned up, what had actually failed inside it, the method that fault required and the equipment it was worked on. One of the thirty-six is a job that was refused, and it belongs here every bit as much as the successes do.
Uneven access is a drive telling you how much time it has left
Blaming the enclosure is the natural first move and it is almost never the answer
Finding a deleted file and returning one that opens are two different pieces of work
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.