The drive took a knock in 2017 and has been in a drawer in Old Swan ever since, brought out every so often for another go with another piece of downloaded software. I think it is a mechanical error, the owner wrote, and he was right. What he wanted were the photographs. What he had was a fixed budget and eight years of well-meant attempts behind him.
| Media | A Western Digital portable drive knocked in 2017, tried repeatedly at home since, holding family photographs with no other copy. |
| What was reported | WD portable drive, impacted in 2017, owner suspected a mechanical fault, tried at home over several years with recovery software, photographs needed, fixed budget stated up front. |
| Fault class | Mechanical. The impact put the heads out of true and they never came back. Nothing done at home afterwards touched the platters, because none of it could reach them. |
| On the bench | Not powered further. Profiled on a current-limited bench supply, opened in clean air under laminar flow, heads and platters inspected under a stereo microscope with the surfaces assessed for scoring, matched donor heads fitted and alignment set, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, photographs located in R-Studio and validated by rendering. |
He had diagnosed it himself, and correctly. A drive that stops at the moment of an impact and never works again has almost always had its heads knocked out of true. The heads fly close enough to the platter that a knock is measured against a gap thinner than smoke. There is nothing subtle about the outcome.
Eight years of software did no harm, and that is worth knowing. Recovery software talks to a drive through the same heads that cannot read. If the heads cannot read, the software gets nothing and writes nothing, because there is nothing to write to. The photographs were exactly where they had been in 2017.
The powering up is what costs you, not the software. Every attempt spun the platters under heads that were not sitting right. That is the mechanism by which a recoverable drive becomes an unrecoverable one, and it is the reason the bench does not power an impacted drive at all before it is open.
The budget question was answered before the work, not after. He said what he could spend in his first message. The diagnostic came back with the surfaces described and a single figure, and he decided against that figure rather than against a hope.
It was not powered on arrival. It went onto a current-limited bench supply so the mechanism could be profiled without letting it run, and the profile matched a head fault. It was then opened in clean air under laminar flow.
Under the stereo microscope the head stack showed the damage the impact had done. The platters were assessed across their full radius for scoring and came back clean, which set the ceiling for the job. Matched donor heads were fitted and alignment set, and the drive was imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA. The photographs were located in R-Studio and validated by rendering a sample from each folder rather than trusting a file count.
Heads replaced, drive imaged, photographs back in full. Eight years in a drawer had cost him nothing except eight years of not having them.
One drive, £300 + VAT. The drive had to be opened, which makes this mechanical work, so 50% of the quoted price was payable before the bench started and the balance only once the files were confirmed. No fix, no fee does not apply to mechanical faults and was not offered on this job.
Put it down and leave it down. The temptation with an impacted drive is to try it once more, and once more after that, and every one of those attempts spins damaged heads across the surface that holds your photographs. Software cannot help here and cannot hurt here, because it never gets a conversation with the disk. What hurts is power. Send it in unpowered, say what happened and roughly when, and let the free diagnostic tell you whether the platters were spared. Age is not the enemy. Nothing fades off a platter in eight years.
Every case file here is written up from a real enquiry handled for households and businesses across Liverpool, Merseyside and the wider North West, anonymised so that nobody is identifiable. Each one gives the reasoning behind the diagnosis, the method the fault actually called for, and the equipment it was worked on.
A drive that needs the cable held at an angle has a failing joint at the port, and it always gets worse
A drive Windows offers to initialise is a drive that has not introduced itself properly, and initialising is the one thing you must not do
A drive somebody has already opened is a harder job than an unopened one, but it is very rarely a finished one
The diagnostic is free and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure is fixed in writing, and logical faults run on no fix, no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.