The fault · a drive you can hear
At the point the noise starts, the data itself is normally untouched. The loss comes afterwards. A head with no idea where it is parks, launches across the surface, misses, parks and launches again, and it will carry on like that as long as there is power at the socket. Each go is another opportunity to make contact with the platter. Cut the power, wherever in Hull the drive is sitting, and the tally stops.
An engineer will take the details
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| The symptoms | What the fault is | What to try |
|---|---|---|
| A tick every second, and it does not let up | The arm needs the servo marks written at the factory to steer by. It cannot read them, so it parks on the ramp and starts the approach again | Cut the power now |
| A thin high beep, normally from a 2.5" pocket drive | Nothing turns at all. The spindle bearing is locked solid, or the heads have stuck fast to the surface | No tapping, no shaking |
| A harsh grinding or rasping | A head is in contact with the platter. The damage is happening now | Files go with every second it runs |
| A short chirp on each power-up | Calibration failing, often after a knock | Switch off and leave it |
| A run of clicks, then nothing | It gives up, resets and then tries the lot again | Pull the lead and stop the loop |
| It only clicks on some files | One head has gone, or one band of the surface is damaged | Stop copying; have it imaged |
Each item that arrives gets a case number the day it lands. An engineer looks at it and finds the real fault, and that costs you nothing. You are told in plain terms which files can come off the drive and which cannot. A price follows — one figure, written down. No work starts until you have seen it and agreed to it.
Before the drive gets any power at all, the mechanism and the platter surfaces are looked at. If a noisy disk does have to be run, it runs for a few seconds at a time with an engineer watching it. It is never left going on its own.
The wrecked head stack is removed and a matched donor set takes its place. A seized spindle is freed off. Heads lying on the platter are lifted clear without marking the surface. The drive is then asked for a full image and nothing else.
A hardware imager reads lightly, skipping anything that stalls and revisiting the difficult areas once the rest is done, until the copy contains every sector the disk is still willing to give up. All the later work is done on the copy. Your drive is not written to.
You are not billed while you are still thinking. The list of what came off the drive goes to you first, and the invoice waits on your word. Files go home on media bought in for the job, with the postage back on us. We keep the job open until you have opened them on your own machine.
There is only one instruction on this page: stop. The clearance between head and platter is a matter of nanometres, with the disk turning thousands of times a minute, and nothing built to that tolerance rights itself. Of all the noisy disks that arrive here, a good outcome and a poor one are separated by the speed somebody reached the socket.
It came in from a shop on Newland Avenue, one tick a second, with five years of books on it. Two donor head stacks, then an image left to run at its own pace, and the accounts were readable again with the VAT return still to file.
Usually not. Clicking tells you the heads have lost their bearings. It tells you nothing about the platters underneath, and the platters are where your files are. Donor heads and a slow, careful image normally bring back most of it. The damage is done by the hours a drive spends running after the noise has started.
No. The advice is older than any drive you are likely to own. Chilling a sealed disk puts moisture inside it and shrinks the metal parts. When it warms up again you have condensation, the makings of corrosion, and a second mechanical fault sitting alongside the first.
The heads go out looking for the servo marks laid down at the factory. They do not find them, so they retreat to the ramp and set off again. That cycle is what you can hear. From outside, a bent head, a dying preamplifier and a scored platter sound much the same. Opening the drive on the bench is what tells them apart.
No. Whatever the software asks for still has to come through the heads that have already failed. All it does is keep the drive at the one job that is finishing it off.
Leave it switched off. A failing drive has a limited number of starts in it, and each one spends a little more. The free diagnosis will say which files can be read.