Case notes · Electrical damage · MHD-2025-6614
I Opened It Up to Look at the Heads.
He had already confessed before the drive even reached us. A thunderstorm over Furze Platt took the power on his street out twice within ten minutes, and once it steadied, the WD Blue in his desktop was ticking away, once every second
. A video had convinced him that the heads were stuck, and so the cover was off on the kitchen table before ten
. He found nothing physically wrong with anything inside, which left him with a guess: either the board or the motor
. It was the open cover that concerned us.
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In everyday terms.
It should be understood that the metal cover on a hard disk is not just a lid for the box but rather one wall of a filtered enclosure. Inside this enclosure, the read/write heads travel over the flat disks (platters), maintaining an air gap measured in nanometres, much closer than any kitchen can possibly keep its air clean. Removing this cover on a work surface is unlikely to immediately destroy a drive. However, removing the cover will reliably double the work in your recovery process, because the electrical damage underneath will still exist. Furthermore, there is now a layer of domestic dust on the very surfaces where the photos reside.
What the bench used here.
How a job is handled →| Tool | Why we used it | What it brings |
|---|---|---|
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Put the fault in the electronics, not the mechanism, and identified the dead driver | Reaches the vendor-specific commands that ordinary ATA has no way of issuing |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Read the platters slowly, making allowance for surfaces exposed to room air | The PC-3000's imaging module, working under firmware-level control |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Reassembled the volume and checked the images opened | Reads the awkward filesystems others stumble over: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS, Btrfs |
The lab work.
Deal with the contamination before the fault
The drive arrived perfectly as requested: no power had been applied to it since, the cover had been put back on, and the entire unit was sealed in a bag. When we inspected the top platter using a microscope, we found evidence of foreign matter present on the surface: specks and fibres that no filter would ever have allowed to enter. All of these contaminants were removed from the surface of the top platter before it even spun once. If you spin a dirty platter, each particle becomes a cutting tool against the head.
Then ask what the surge destroyed
With the surfaces cleaned, we were able to trust our readings. All three components (heads, motor and platters) tested good. As it turned out, the damage was purely electrical in nature: the surge had destroyed the motor control component located on the circuit board. Once a hard disk cannot spin up to normal operating RPMs, it tries again one time per second, and to anyone outside of the case, this is identical to how a head fault appears. His reading was reasonable; it was the drive that was misrepresenting itself.
Restore the board, then read slowly
A donor board of the same version supplied all of the electronics, and the ROM from the old board (which had been damaged) was moved onto it; without this chip a new board will work without seeing anything. The imaging ran slowly, and we used short times for retries, as once a platter has come into contact with the air in the room it stays questionable, even though it may have been cleaned. The drive came through intact.
How the job closed.
All of the scanned negatives came back: three winters of photography of Furze Platt and its people. He was much closer to losing those photographs than anyone reported at the time. He now keeps two copies, and his Torx keys have been retired.
More of the jobs we've closed.
More on Electrical damage.
Does any of that match your case?
Do not decide anything until after receiving the diagnostic results back: turn off the device, get a quote, then send it in, and let the diagnostic findings tell you what you need to know.