Desktop externals · bench notes · HUL-2025-0334
The Loud One Is Not the Urgent One.
A holiday-letting agency in Hornsea closed one of its offices and posted both drives together. The Iomega had sat in a stationery cupboard for years and was fetched out to take one last archive copy. It never got through it — ten minutes into a folder and it drops off
— which everyone blamed on how old the thing is
. The Seagate was the newer of the two. It was standing on top of a filing cabinet when a removals trolley went into it. Since then it just clicks, over and over
, and nothing on the desk picks it up
.
Sounds like yours? Ring us.
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What causes it.
Sorting by volume gets this exactly the wrong way round. A head stack destroyed in a knock is a settled fault. The heads cannot reach the platters, and they will not get any worse sitting in a drawer; the Seagate would have been in the same state a month later. The Iomega was the one on a clock, because it still part-worked. Its reads had slowed past the point where a USB bridge stays interested; Windows quit halfway through every copy, and every power-up cost it a few more sectors that never came back. Noise tells you a drive has failed. It says nothing about which one to open first.
The tools this one needed.
The steps we follow →| The gear | What this one did | Why we have it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Took the Seagate once it had new heads: map the heads, then read the best surfaces first | Grades each head first, reads one surface at a time, and keeps resets, timeouts and power under control |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | A single run across the Iomega, with every stall capped, timed and logged | Copying is run at firmware level, with the PC-3000 in charge |
| R-Studio Technician | Rebuilt each drive's folder tree from its finished image | Handles almost any file system, and puts RAID sets back together |
The stages.
Order of work follows the fault, not the volume
Sharing a box gave neither drive priority. Each got its place from its own fault. Left unpowered, the Seagate in a month's time is the same drive that arrived, so nothing was lost by making it wait. The Iomega had nothing like that to spare. For every hour under power it gave up sectors it would not give back. So the Iomega went on the bench and the Seagate went on a shelf.
Start on the Iomega and do not stop
Every stall was costing surface, so stalls were rationed. Each read had a short, fixed allowance. Anything that overran was logged, left alone, and picked up on a later pass with gentler settings. The drive never dropped off the bus and no pass had to be restarted. The thing that had defeated the office turned into a list of skipped ranges, and the copy ran at an even rate.
The Seagate next: new heads, no clock
Nothing was coming off the Seagate until the head stack was replaced. A donor set was matched, fitted under laminar flow, and every head tested on the bench before a single read. The knock had scored one platter surface. The other surfaces read cleanly and gave up all of their contents. The scored one returned part of what it held.
How it finished.
The result came out the opposite way round from what the office had assumed. The Iomega, which they had already given up on, came back all but complete. The gap was on the Seagate: that single scored band, and the owner records that happened to live inside it. Those are listed by name in the report, not folded into a percentage.
What people read after this.
Tagged Desktop externals too.
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.