A garage in Braunstone keeps its service history, MOT paperwork and the photographs its technicians take of every job on one external drive that lives in the office and gets carried about more than it should. It had been dropped once, then wrestled with, and by the time somebody looked at it properly the list of faults ran to three: the socket had come away, the board was dead, and a firm that examined it reported the head assembly was damaged as well. The quotation that came back with that list was, in the owner's words, extremely expensive.
| Media | An external hard drive with three separate faults on the way to its contents: a broken interface socket, a failed circuit board and a damaged head assembly, all identified by an earlier examination. |
| What was reported | Hard drive said to have three separate faults at once, the socket torn away, the board dead and the head assembly damaged, an earlier recovery quotation described as extremely expensive, garage service records and job photography wanted back. |
| Fault class | Three faults, worked in order, none of them in the material itself. The socket had torn from its pads, the board had failed at one component, and two heads had been damaged by the same fall that broke the socket. The surfaces underneath were sound. |
| On the bench | The socket rebuilt under a stereo microscope with the lifted pads bridged, purely so the assembly could be reached; the board's failed component identified on a current-limited bench supply and repaired, with the disk's own calibration chip retained; opened under laminar flow, the head assembly replaced with matched donors and alignment set, both surfaces inspected for scoring; imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA with the head map watched; the volume parsed in R-Studio and records and photographs opened before release. |
Three faults from one event is the ordinary pattern, not bad luck. A drive that lands on its connector end breaks the socket, and the shock travels through the board and into the head assembly at the same instant. Whoever plugs it in afterwards then finds it dead and assumes an electrical problem. All three were real and all three came from the same afternoon.
The order of the work is what makes it one job rather than three. The socket and the board are not repaired because anybody wants a working external drive at the end; they are repaired to get as far as the disk. The heads are the actual work. Fixing them in any other order means opening a drive you cannot then read, which is the sort of thing that turns into a series of invoices.
Price per fault is a choice somebody made, not a law of the trade. The published figure here is per disk. A disk with three faults takes longer than one with a single fault, and that is a matter for the bench diary rather than for the customer's bill. Where a job genuinely cannot be done at the published figure, the honest answer is to say so at the assessment and decline it, which is a different conversation from a quotation that grows.
None of the three faults is where the material lives. The socket is a way in. The board is the controller. The heads are the reading mechanism. What the garage needed was on the platters, which had been sealed inside the whole time and had never been touched by any of it.
The socket went first, since nothing could be assessed until the assembly could be powered. Two pads had lifted and were bridged with fine wire under the microscope, which is a repair intended to last an afternoon rather than a decade. With that done, the board pulled hard on a current-limited supply and the failed component showed itself immediately.
The board was repaired with the disk's own calibration chip left in place, so nothing had to be transferred and nothing was guessed at. It brought up, identified and then behaved exactly as the earlier examination had predicted: a repeating seek and no completed start-up.
Under laminar flow, two heads were bent and the surfaces showed light marking in one band. Donor heads were fitted, alignment was set, and the disk imaged on DeepSpar with the map monitored. R-Studio parsed the volume, and service records and job photographs were opened rather than counted before the set went to fresh media.
The service history came back in full and so did the photography, apart from a few hundred images from one month that sat in the marked band. The garage was given the list of what was missing so that it could tell which customers might need re-photographing rather than discovering it later.
Three faults and one disk, so £300 + VAT, which is what any single disk costs. Opening one in clean air and soldering on a board are both named in the published exclusion, so 50% of the figure was payable before the work began and the balance once the records had been checked.
Do not let the number of faults frighten you into paying by the item. Ask what the total figure is, ask whether it can move, and ask what happens to your deposit if the job does not succeed. On a drive with a broken socket, resist the very natural urge to hold the cable in place at an angle to get one more copy off, because the twisting is what tears the remaining pads and it can short across the supply while it is doing it. Do not have the socket repaired locally either, since a general repair shop can often reattach it and cannot do anything about what is behind it, and the drive then arrives having been powered up several more times. Send it as it is, with any pieces that have come off it in the same bag, and say what you already know about how it was damaged.
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.
A second opinion is worth having on the price even when the first diagnosis is correct
Finding a deleted file and returning one that opens are two different pieces of work
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.