Missing or corrupt files · case file · HUL-2025-0311
Every Big Copy Halted on the Same Line.
The Toshiba sat in its dock on a shelf in the office, and had done for years, when the power went off. Nothing would copy after that. A few files at first, then entire folders, every one stopping at cyclic redundancy check
. He tried a different lead, took it through to the laptop in the works, and set Windows checking it two nights in a row, and it was still going both mornings
. On it were three decades of shop drawings belonging to a fabricator on the Sutton Fields estate in Hull: every set of stairs and every handrail since I started out
.
Sounds like yours? Ring us.
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What causes it.
That message means less than people assume. It reports one thing: a block came back from the drive and did not match the check value stored with it. Nothing else. Two quite separate faults end up there — a filesystem whose bookkeeping is out of step on sound hardware, or a surface that can no longer hold what was written on it. Treat the second like the first and you make it worse, which is why guesswork is expensive here. Windows answers a weak patch by asking for it over and over, until the sector replies or the drive stops answering. Two nights of that had already gone by.
The tools this one needed.
The steps we follow →| The gear | What this one did | Why we have it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Copied the Toshiba with a retry ceiling, marking the bad ground and moving on | Grades each head first, reads one surface at a time, and keeps resets, timeouts and power under control |
| R-Studio Technician | Rebuilt the volume from the image rather than the drive | Handles almost any file system, and puts RAID sets back together |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Read the firmware before anything else: attribute trends, the grown defect list, and two power-on sessions that ran all night | Reaches the vendor service commands an ordinary ATA connection cannot |
The stages.
Ask the drive first. It keeps records
No sector was read until the firmware had been asked, and what it said was plain enough. The reallocated count was high and still rising, with more sectors queued behind it waiting their turn. Two long power-on sessions in the log matched his two nights of scanning almost hour for hour. So this was the surface, not the bookkeeping.
Every retry costs time, so cap them
The limits were fixed before the imaging began. Timeouts kept short, a set number of attempts, and any band that resisted was logged, skipped and left where it was. Those skipped bands got one short second pass at the very end. It is arithmetic, not stubbornness. Spend an hour on one bad sector and the thousand good ones behind it may never get read.
Power the drive down, then work on the image
With the copy safely written, the Toshiba was switched off and left that way. The copy turned out better than the counters had suggested. The folder tree was whole, and the losses sat together in one band, under a set of scanned sheets. Every missing sheet was listed by its own file name, so he left with a list to check against the plan chest instead of an apology.
How it finished.
He had named the folder that came before any other while still on the phone: stairs and balustrades on buildings that are still in use. It was opened and read through before anyone mentioned the bill. The archive travelled back on a new disk, whole but for the sheets the report names. Two of them he can draw again from paper kept at the works. The rest belong to jobs done before he took the firm over, and that paper was cleared out long since.
What people read after this.
More cases of corruption and deletion.
Is yours doing the same?
Turn it off. Send it to us. The diagnosis comes first. It says which files are still readable and which are not.