The fault · a clicking, beeping disk
Clicking drives reach the bench from Maidenhead most weeks. A head that cannot establish where it sits will retreat to its parking ramp and attempt the whole manoeuvre again, and again, passing over the recorded surface each time. The files are generally still intact when the noise starts; what erodes them is the number of attempts that follow. Reaching the power switch early is what preserves the odds.
Describe the fault to an engineer
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| The signs | The likely cause | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| A steady tick repeating every second or so | Position data is written onto the platter as servo marks; unable to read them, the arm parks and begins the whole sequence again | Cut the power |
| A faint high beep, almost always from a 2.5" portable | Nothing rotates: either the spindle bearing has locked solid, or heads settled onto the platter are holding it in place | Do not shake or tap |
| A scraping, grinding noise | Head-to-platter contact: the crash is happening now | Every powered second removes data |
| A chirp each time it starts | Calibration failing, commonly after a knock | Power off; leave it |
| Bursts of clicking, then silence | The drive resets after each failed retry sequence | Unplug it; stop the cycle |
| Clicking only on certain files | A single weakening head, or damage limited to one band | Stop copying; get it imaged |
Nothing becomes chargeable until you have said yes to it. Each item takes a case number of its own the moment it arrives, an engineer establishes what has actually failed, and you are given a candid view of which files stand a realistic chance of returning. The single quote that follows is fixed, written down, and costs nothing.
No power reaches the drive until the mechanism and the recording surfaces have been looked at. If a clicking disk has to turn at all, it turns under supervision, for seconds at a time, and never unattended.
A ruined head assembly is replaced from a matched donor, a locked spindle is freed, and heads resting on the platter are lifted away without contact. After that the drive is asked to do one thing only: give up a complete image.
A hardware imager takes the disk gently, stepping over unreadable regions and returning to the weakest zones at the end, until a good copy holds everything obtainable. Repair of the file system then happens on that copy alone.
Nothing is billed until you have seen the recovered file list in full and told us to go ahead. What comes back arrives on new media, with the return journey at our cost, and the case stays open at this end until you have opened every file yourself.
There is one instruction: stop the drive. A head flies a few nanometres above a surface turning at thousands of revolutions a minute, so there is no margin at all once something slips. Across the noisy disks handled at this bench, the best indicator of a good outcome is how quickly the power came out.
It arrived ticking at about one beat a second, carrying five years of till records. Two donor head assemblies later, and one slow, careful image, the bookkeeping was whole again and the shop's VAT return went in on time.
In most cases, yes. The noise reports a positioning failure in the head assembly, not a verdict on the recording surfaces. Matched donor parts and a patient, low-speed image usually return the bulk of a disk. What costs you data is the time it spends powered up afterwards.
None. The idea dates from drive designs long out of production. Chilling a modern disk brings in condensation and contracts the metal inside it, so you add corrosion and fresh mechanical damage to whatever was already wrong.
What you hear is the head assembly searching for the servo pattern written at manufacture, missing it, parking back on the ramp and setting off again. Damaged heads, a failing preamplifier and scored surfaces all sound alike; only inspection separates them.
No. Every scan a program runs still goes through the same failing heads, so the software is issuing exactly the reads that finish the disk off.
Each further power-up asks more of a drive that has already begun to fail. Open the case first and let the free diagnosis tell you what is left.