A restaurant on Belgrave Road had its office PC wiped by a well-meaning repair, on the understanding that everything was on the external drive in the desk drawer. When they went to restore, the drive clicked and nothing appeared. Its outer casing had come away at one corner some months earlier and had been held on with tape ever since, so the assumption in the office was that the tape was the problem. The light still came on, which was taken as encouraging.
| Media | An old Compaq-branded external drive whose outer casing has partly come away, kept as the restaurant's backup. It powers, the indicator lights, and it clicks continuously without presenting a volume. |
| What was reported | Compaq external drive, clicking steadily, its shell partly detached and taped in place, the indicator lighting as usual, wanted for a restore after the office machine was rebuilt, no second copy anywhere. |
| Fault class | Mechanical. The head stack had failed and the clicking was the drive attempting a read it could not complete. The damaged casing was cosmetic and had no bearing on the fault, and the indicator lighting only showed that the enclosure had power. |
| On the bench | Not run further, taken out of the remains of the casing and profiled once on a current-limited bench supply, opened under laminar flow with the head stack and both platter surfaces examined under a stereo microscope, matched donor heads sourced from a drive of the same family and fitted with alignment set, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA head by head, and the accounts and supplier records parsed in R-Studio and opened before being written to fresh media. |
An external drive is an ordinary disk in a plastic box. The box holds it still, keeps dust off and carries the socket. It has nothing to do with whether the disk reads. A casing that has come away looks like the most serious thing about the drive and is very close to the least, which is worth knowing before somebody spends an evening trying to make the tape hold better.
The indicator light is the least informative part of the whole device. On most enclosures it is wired to show that power has arrived, and on some it flickers with activity on the connection rather than with anything the disk is doing. A drive with completely destroyed heads will light up exactly as brightly as a healthy one. Reading it as a sign of life is understandable and it misleads people into repeated attempts.
Clicking on a backup drive is a different emergency to clicking on a working one. The office PC had already been wiped, so the drive was no longer a copy of anything: it was the original, and the only one. That changes the correct response from investigate to stop, because the usual cheap fallback of restoring from somewhere else no longer exists.
Older models make the donor question real. Head replacement needs a matched drive of the same family and firmware generation to take parts from, and for a drive of this age those are scarce rather than absent. It is one of the few ways in which age genuinely does matter, and it is a question of supply rather than of whether the data survived, which it had.
It was not powered up on arrival. What remained of the casing came away and the disk was profiled once on a current-limited supply: the spindle held speed, the head assembly moved repeatedly with nothing following, and the current trace showed no electrical fault at all.
Under laminar flow the head stack was worn on two of its four heads and the surfaces beneath showed light marking on the outer band and nothing further in. A matched donor of the same family was found and its heads fitted with alignment set. Imaging ran on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA head by head so that a failure part way through would cost one surface rather than the set, and R-Studio parsed the volume from the image with the accounts and supplier records opened before anything went to fresh media.
The accounts, the supplier records and several years of menus and photography came back complete. The restaurant now keeps a second copy on a drive that stays off site, on the plain grounds that a backup which lives in the same drawer as the machine it backs up is a copy rather than a safeguard.
One disk is £300 + VAT. Head replacement is mechanical work and outside the published guarantee, so 50% was payable upfront, with the balance once the office had confirmed the records.
Send the drive as it is, tape and all, rather than trying to make the casing good first. A broken shell is not the fault and prising at it risks the connection between the socket and the disk, which is a joint you would rather arrive intact. Ignore the indicator light entirely; it reports power, not health. Most importantly, if this drive is the only remaining copy because a machine has already been wiped or replaced, say so at the outset, because it changes how cautiously the first read is approached. Do not test it again in the meantime: a clicking drive has a limited number of attempts in it and there is nothing left to fall back on.
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.
Age is not the barrier people expect; sitting still for thirty years is a different matter
Three disks are three examinations and three answers, not one job with a discount at the end
Beeping is a mechanism drawing power it cannot turn into movement
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.