A builder in Countesthorpe photographed every job he finished, and all of it lived on one 1TB WD portable: elevations before and after, damp courses opened up, the certificates that go with each of them. The drive came off a scaffold board in 2011 and has not been readable since. Two computer shops looked at it in the years afterwards, each said it wanted a clean room, and neither took it further, so it went into a drawer and stayed there. Is there any point after this long, he asked.
| Media | A 1TB WD portable drive that fell from height in 2011 and has produced nothing since. Two general repair shops have examined it over the years; neither opened it under controlled air. |
| What was reported | WD portable drive, dropped on site in 2011, unreadable ever since, seen by two computer shops but never opened properly, fifteen years of building photography and certification wanted off it. |
| Fault class | Mechanical. The impact took the head stack out of alignment and nothing that happened afterwards altered that, because a drive sitting in a drawer neither improves nor decays. The surfaces were unmarked, which is what fifteen years of not being switched on buys. |
| On the bench | Lifted out of its enclosure and kept unpowered, then profiled once on a current-limited bench supply so a single start could be recorded as a curve; opened under laminar flow with the head stack and both surfaces read under a stereo microscope; matched donor heads fitted from the same family and alignment set; imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA with the original bridge board used to resolve the encryption on the way out; the volume parsed in R-Studio and photographs opened at random before the whole set was written to fresh media. |
A fall breaks the mechanism that reads, and that mechanism holds nothing. The heads travel a few nanometres above a spinning surface, on an arm light enough to move across it in milliseconds, and a hard landing bends that assembly out of true. Once it is out of true the drive can no longer read, including the reserved region that tells it what it is, so it presents nothing to a computer. The recorded material is on the platters underneath, entirely unaware of any of it.
Fifteen years in a drawer changed nothing worth mentioning. People assume storage ages like film, and it does not. The magnetic pattern on a platter is stable across decades in ordinary indoor conditions; what shortens a drive's life is being run, and this one had barely been run since the day it landed. The clock that costs an owner money starts when a damaged drive is powered up again, not when it is put away.
Two shops turning it down was two shops being right. A repair counter with a workbench and a screwdriver can change a lead, a caddy or a board, and none of those was the fault here. Opening a drive means filtered air, a donor of the correct family in stock, and a means of setting alignment afterwards. Sending him away with the drive intact was better service than an attempt would have been, even if it did not feel like it at the time.
The case and the lead had to come too, and that is unusual advice. On a WD portable the encryption is done by the small board inside the enclosure rather than by the disk, so a bare disk images into something no software can interpret. He posted the whole thing as it was, which is exactly right for that make and wrong for almost nothing else.
Nothing was plugged in when it arrived. The disk came out of the plastic and went onto a current-limited supply, where one start-up was recorded rather than repeated: current rising, a short seek attempt, and no settle into a steady running draw. That is a head fault rather than a motor one, and it matched what the fall predicted.
Under laminar flow the head stack showed the damage plainly under magnification, one slider sitting at an angle its neighbours were not. Both surfaces were walked from the inner radius outward and carried no scoring at all, which is the reward for a drive that was never run on afterwards. Donor heads of the same family were fitted, alignment was set, and the disk imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA in one pass with no rereads worth the name.
The image came off encrypted, as a WD portable's always does when the disk is read on its own. The enclosure board he had sent with it supplied what was needed to turn that back into a volume, R-Studio parsed it, and photographs from either end of the fifteen years were opened on screen before anything was called finished.
All of it came back: the job photography from 2005 onwards, the certificates, and a folder of invoices he had forgotten was on there. He had been told twice that the drive was probably beyond help and had believed it for over a decade, which is the part of this job worth writing down.
One disk is £300 + VAT whatever year it stopped. Opening a drive under laminar flow is mechanical work and the published exclusion names it, so 50% of the figure was settled before the lid came off and the rest once he had his own photographs in front of him.
Age is not the obstacle, and neither is the length of time it has been ignored. If a drive stopped the day it was dropped and has been left alone since, it is in the best condition a damaged drive can be in, because every power-up after a head fault is what turns a repairable disk into a scored one. Do not test it to see whether it has come right on its own. Do not let anybody open it to look, since a drive opened in ordinary room air collects particles that were not previously a problem. If it is a WD portable, send the case, the disk and the lead together rather than prising the plastic apart, because the part that unscrambles the data is in the case. Post it insured, or hand it in at the lab reception on a weekday between nine and half past five.
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.
Beeping is a mechanism drawing power it cannot turn into movement
Silence after clicking is the drive giving up on schedule, not a second failure arriving
On a My Passport the key lives in the case, so the case and its cable travel with the disk
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.