Desktop externals · bench notes · HUL-2025-0334
The Loud One Is Not the Urgent One.
A holiday letting company in Hornsea shut down one of its offices and posted both drives (Iomega and Seagate) together. The Iomega had simply been gathering dust for many years and was retrieved for archiving. It never got through it: ten minutes into a folder and it drops off
, which everyone attributed to how old the thing is
. The Seagate was the newest of the two. It had been placed on top of a filing cabinet and a removals trolley went directly into it. From that time forward, it just clicks, over and over
, and nothing on the desk picks it up
.
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What causes it.
Sorting based upon volume would flip the order of these incorrectly. A mechanical failure that occurs upon impact (knock) results in a permanent failure. The heads cannot access the disks and do not deteriorate while sitting in a drawer. Therefore, the Seagate would remain in this condition in thirty days. On the other hand the Iomega was the one on a clock, since it continued to operate at some level. Its reads were slowing down past the level needed for a USB bridge to remain engaged, so Windows kept quitting while trying to make copies. Each time it was powered up it lost several more sectors that would never come back. In short, noise indicates that a drive has failed. However, noise does not indicate which drive should be opened 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
Each stall was burning up the disk surface, thus stalls were strictly limited. Every read operation had an extremely small allocation for reading. Any operations that exceeded those allocations were recorded, ignored, and processed again using softer parameters during another pass. The drive did not lose its connection to the host and none of the passes needed to be restarted. The office's problem became a list of ranges that had been skipped during copying and the process continued at a constant speed.
The Seagate next: new heads, no clock
No information would transfer from the Seagate until the head assembly was replaced. A matched donor set was obtained, fitted, and every head tested on the workbench prior to attempting any reads. One side of one of the platters had been scratched by the impact. All remaining sides read without problems and provided all of their data. The scratched side returned some of the user's data.
How it finished.
The results were the opposite of those expected by the people working in the office. The Iomega, an item they had already dismissed, came back nearly complete. The issue existed on the Seagate: a single scored band was present, and this area contained some of the owner records. These records are specifically named within the report rather than being included in a percentage.
What people read after this.
Tagged Desktop externals too.
Is yours doing the same?
Shut it off. Obtain a quote first. Send it to us for evaluation. Our diagnosis is done first. We tell you which files remain readable and which are unreadable.