A family from Southport had been told their drive was damaged by the head and that recovery was pretty much impossible, the device done for. On it were fifteen years of holidays, mostly the same stretch of coast, never backed up anywhere. They came for a second opinion expecting to be told the same thing more politely.
| Media | A Western Digital portable drive previously assessed elsewhere as head damaged and beyond recovery, holding fifteen years of family photographs with no backup. |
| What was reported | WD portable drive, told by another party that the internal disc was damaged by the head, told recovery was near impossible, fifteen years of family photographs, no backup, second opinion sought. |
| Fault class | Mechanical. A head fault, as previously described. The platters underneath were clean, which is the fact that decided the outcome and which had never been established. |
| On the bench | Profiled on a current-limited bench supply, opened in clean air under laminar flow, head stack and platter surfaces inspected under a stereo microscope with the surfaces assessed for scoring across their full radius, matched donor heads fitted and alignment set, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, photographs located in R-Studio and validated, the recoverable extent established and quoted before any charge. |
Damaged by the head is not the same as damaged platters. The head is a component. It can be replaced. The platter is the thing that holds your photographs and it cannot be replaced, only read. Head damage on its own is among the most routine work a recovery bench does.
The word impossible needs a look inside to earn it. Whoever gave that verdict had not opened the drive in clean air, because the only way to know whether the platters are scored is to inspect them under magnification. Until that has been done, impossible is a guess, and it is a guess that costs a family fifteen years.
What would have made it impossible. Deep circular scoring, where a failed head has been dragged across the surface until it has cut through the magnetic layer. That is real and it does happen, usually after a drive has been powered again and again with heads already down. It is also visible immediately once the lid is off.
The platters were clean. Whatever else the earlier assessment got wrong, the family had done the important thing: they had stopped using it. The surfaces had never been given the chance to be ruined.
It went onto a current-limited bench supply first, so the mechanism could be profiled without giving it a proper run, and then straight into clean air under laminar flow.
Under the stereo microscope the head stack showed the damage that had been described. The platters were assessed across their full radius and showed no scoring at all. 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. The recoverable extent was established and quoted before a penny was charged, which is the order it should always happen in.
Fifteen years of holidays came back, the full run of them. It is worth being plain about the limits of that result: a head fault over clean platters is routine, a head fault over scored platters is not, and no bench can tell you which you have until it has looked.
One drive, £300 + VAT, with 50% payable upfront because the drive had to be opened. Mechanical work is excluded from no fix, no fee and nobody here suggested otherwise. What is free is the diagnostic that tells you whether the job is worth doing at all.
Ask one question: has anybody opened it and looked at the platters. If the answer is no, then impossible is an opinion formed from the outside. Head damage over sound platters is ordinary work with an ordinary outcome. Scored platters are a genuine limit and any bench worth using will tell you so plainly and show you why. In the meantime do not power the drive up to check whether the verdict was right, because that is the one action that can turn a wrong verdict into a correct one. Leave it off and get it looked at properly.
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.
One firm's failure describes the equipment they had, not the state of what is on the platters
A wireless drive whose network still shows but whose files will not open is read straight, out of the enclosure serving it
An impacted drive has a head fault, and years of home attempts do not change what is sitting on the platters
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.