Mains-powered externals · logged · HUL-2025-0903
Two Clicks, and the Heads Were Worn Through.
In Beverley, a family blamed the USB port for nearly a full calendar year. Their two children's first ten years were stored as photographs on the Toshiba. The only indication they had of something going wrong was that it kept getting slower and slower every month
. A fatal hardware error
from Windows eliminated the possibility of the USB port causing the problem. A neighbour attempted to view the photos by connecting the Toshiba to his own PC, and his laptop never saw it at all
. At this point, the Toshiba would power up, click twice and shut itself down
.
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What causes it.
The adaptive and calibration tables reside in a reserved band on the platters. No drive will be recognised by a computer until those tables have been read. When the head wears down to the point that it cannot lift enough data to read those tables, then something designed happens as opposed to something that happens accidentally. Firmware allows itself two attempts to access those tables. Between the two attempts the firmware will calibrate again. Then the firmware will turn off instead of continuing to operate with numbers that it cannot trust. Those two attempts are represented by the clicking sounds heard. The slow year prior to the clicking was the accumulation of the same wear as it occurred silently. In addition, Microsoft's operating system (Windows) simply expressed verbally what the hard drive had been indicating for months prior to failing completely.
The tools this one needed.
The steps we follow →| The gear | What this one did | Why we have it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Measured every head on the new stack and set the order the surfaces came off | Grades each head first, reads one surface at a time, and keeps resets, timeouts and power under control |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Ran the read passes, answering each stall with either a controlled reset or a cut in power | Copying is run at firmware level, with the PC-3000 in charge |
| R-Studio Technician | Rebuilt the folder structure from the finished image | Handles almost any file system, and puts RAID sets back together |
The stages.
The noise was evidence, not an annoyance
Every time, there were two clicking sounds but never three, followed by the disk shutting down. This represents the power-on read and not some form of ordinary usage. Since there were two clicks associated with the power-on read, this identifies the reserved tracks as the site of the initial failure. Magnification supported this conclusion. There was no evidence of chipping nor did there appear to be any type of damage from impact. Every slider exhibited even wear consistent with a very high number of hours of flying.
New heads before anything
Another stack from the same production lot was brought into service, and the disk successfully completed its start-up read, remained powered and identified itself. Next, mapping began rather than being delayed: wear seldom accumulates evenly across the surfaces of a disk that has experienced extensive wear due to use, and a map illustrates where good data remains and where it is gone.
Image it at once, the strongest heads first
Due to the fact that a disk experiencing excessive wear such as this will almost certainly fail to allow a second power cycle, an image of the contents was created immediately following repair while the drive was still on the workbench. Initially full speed operation was used on the sound heads. Once the majority of all content had been successfully copied from elsewhere on the disk, the questionable areas were subsequently processed at reduced speeds. With the previously unreadable reserved area of the disk readable once more, nearly all content was obtained without further conflict.
How it finished.
The image proved to be complete. All content was removed from this duplicate and not directly from the original disk, and each folder was sequentially examined by year prior to closing the case. Ultimately, due to grinding down its own heads, the Toshiba was discarded: once a drive has destroyed its own heads there is nothing remaining in it that can be used by anyone.
What people read after this.
Tagged Desktop externals too.
Is yours doing the same?
Power off. First obtain a quote, then send it to us. We provide the diagnostic first. It states which of your files remain readable and which do not.