External drives · bench notes · HUL-2025-1124
I Set DMDE Going at Bedtime and Woke to Grinding.
He chose to run the scan for the purpose of recovery. For twenty years he worked as a mobile DJ, so everything from his career sat on that Expansion: every set I've played and every mix of my own
. In addition, Disk Management had flagged the volume as unallocated
, with options to initialise it. He refused to click that option; read a forum thread; and fired up DMDE right before bed
. By morning, the log contained thousands of errors, one after the other
, and underneath that an entirely new noise that had never been produced by anything in that drive: grinding, you could hear it from the landing
. His message ended with I had the power on far too long
.
Sounds like yours? Ring us.
0800 6890668
What causes it.
It's when a computer user sees "unallocated" that they immediately go looking for a scan, and that is where the problem starts. When a hard drive cannot read even its own partition table, it usually means that the hard drive has stopped reading correctly. Worn heads sit near the top of the list of reasons why that happens. Once a hard drive is scanned (a process known as a full-surface scan) it forces the very same worn heads to cross over each and every sector on the entire disk for hours, non-stop, without so much as a single break. Not many failing heads will survive the trip. Sometime during that night, the weakest of the four failing heads lost its air support under it and fell onto a platter. That is the grinding sound you could hear coming from the landing. Each time thereafter the heads took off additional amounts of coating and returned nothing.
The tools this one needed.
The steps we follow →| The gear | What this one did | Why we have it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Mapped all four surfaces and fenced off what the scan had wrecked | Grades each head first, reads one surface at a time, and keeps resets, timeouts and power under control |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Read in long unbroken sweeps, sound areas taken first | Copying is run at firmware level, with the PC-3000 in charge |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Rebuilt the volume so each track went back into its own folder | Opens the volume formats most tools cannot: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS, Btrfs |
The stages.
Map the damage before naming a price
With the cover off, the head stack was rubbish and both platters were scored: light over most of the disk and much worse where it had spent the longest time scanning. The job was saved because he pulled the plug when he did. Had he continued running the job through another night instead of stopping at breakfast, this page would be empty today.
Heads first, and no figure until the map exists
A replacement head assembly of the same type was installed into the drive and enabled the disk to operate once again. After completing a survey of what parts of the disk were still operable, we created a complete map showing exactly which areas of the disk were still responding. The vast majority of the disk's area returned quickly and cleanly. Over the scratched regions, however, signal strength began to weaken and eventually ceased altogether. He was given no price quotes until after that map was completed.
Take the sound ground first, then work into the scoring
The read swept in very large segments, and only moved the actuator as much as the job permitted, because each movement of the actuator across a scored surface can pull unattached debris into good areas. Clean areas were read first, in one piece, onto new media. Then the banded sections were read in small, slow movements, giving up as much data as possible.
How it finished.
Almost all of the files were placed back into their original location within his file structure. The few items that did not make it back resided in areas of banded failure on the disk; these items were identified by a complete list located in his report. This report indicated that the items that could not be recovered included a group of previously released tracks he could purchase again; and four personal recordings he held no copies of anywhere else. These things were written down simply and without embellishment.
What people read after this.
Tagged Desktop externals too.
Is yours doing the same?
Turn it off. First get a quote; then send it to us. The diagnosis comes first. The diagnosis identifies what files remain recoverable and which do not.