Missing or corrupt files · lab log · HUL-2025-1113
It Fell, and It Still Sounds Fine.
A shelf bracket over a desk in Hornsea let go part-way through a backup, and the My Book hit the floor with both leads still attached. It held a family’s entire video collection, camcorder tapes transferred across included. Nothing about it looked wrong afterwards: it starts up just the same as before
, it makes no odd noises at all
, and Windows is still happy to offer Eject My Book
. The drive letter never turns up.
Sounds like yours? Ring us.
0800 6890668
What causes it.
A drive letter is the last item in a queue, and everything ahead of it has to work first: the heads and motor, then the bridge board inside the enclosure, then the partition table, and the filesystem after that. Here the first two were fine — it spun up to speed and announced itself to the machine — so the queue stopped at the third. That is what a write cut off in the middle leaves behind. The records were broken; the mechanism was not. There is a second rule with enclosures like this one. Decryption happens on the small board in the case, so the disk and that board come to the bench together and are never separated. Separate the two and every sector you read is meaningless.
The tools this one needed.
The steps we follow →| The gear | What this one did | Why we have it |
|---|---|---|
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Cleared the heads, motor and platters before any logical work began | Reaches the vendor service commands an ordinary ATA connection cannot |
| DeepSpar USB Imager | Imaged it through its own bridge, leaving the decryption in place | Normal imaging speed, straight through the USB bridge |
| R-Studio Technician | Repaired the partition table and NTFS structures on the copy | Handles almost any file system, and puts RAID sets back together |
The stages.
Prove the mechanics are sound first
A drive that sounds right has proved nothing. Spin-up current, read rates head by head, the two defect lists and the reallocation counters were each put on the meters, and every reading came out where it ought to be. Twenty minutes on the meters turned a worrying job into an ordinary one.
Copy it with the board still fitted
On a My Book the key belongs to the small USB board in the case, so the image was taken with that board left in the path, and it read cleanly from the very start. Lift the bare disk out and read it straight off a SATA port, and the copy you take will be flawless and unreadable — all the bytes, none of the meaning.
Repair the image and leave the disk alone
From the copy the damage looked small and recent: a single partition entry that stopped mid-write, in the second the drive came off the shelf. It was put right on the image; the drive itself was never written to at any stage, and the volume mounted at once, with folders and timestamps exactly where they belonged.
How it finished.
Nothing had been lost. Counted off the copy, the files came to the number the folders claimed. Disk and bridge were handled as one object from first meter reading to last, and with hardware built this way that habit does most of the work.
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.