An ageing desktop disk with heads on their last legs, nursed through a patient image to save the one copy a family had of their photographs.
This old Compaq had been kept running for just one purpose: stored on it were years of family photographs held nowhere else. The drive inside — an IDE/PATA unit dating from when a disk held a tiny fraction of what one does now — had become slow and erratic, the classic signature of heads long past their best over a surface steadily gathering bad sectors. With the pictures irreplaceable and the disk clearly failing, the sole sensible step was to take a full copy off it before it quit for good.
On the bench the disk threw up mounting bad-sector tallies and long hangs across sections of the platter — worn heads toiling over a surface on the wane. Disks of this vintage almost never fail all at once; they degrade little by little, part-working until suddenly they don’t, which is the very reason pulling the data off without delay matters as much as it does.
Imaging ran on the DeepSpar. It banked the healthy regions of the disk up front, then came back to the awkward ones over a series of gentle passes rather than pounding a fragile surface to pieces — and its firm handle on retries and timeouts is precisely what keeps a spent drive alive long enough to hand over what it holds. Firmware and defect tables, themselves the worse for age, were taken on by the PC3000. A disk this old asks for patience before anything else, and the image built up slowly, one run after another.
Working from the finished image, we reassembled the file system and made sure the photographs opened as they should before saving them onto present-day storage.
The complete photo archive was returned across seven working days, at last sitting somewhere permanent. The enduring lesson with elderly machines is a simple one: whatever lives on a disk of that age wants moving onto something modern today, since the next time it powers up may well be the last.
DeepSpar DDI · PC3000 — imaged over repeated passes and rebuilt on our own bench. A copy is taken first; the original is never written to.
Get the device to us for a free diagnostic and a quick note on what went wrong — an engineer looks it over and puts your exact quote in writing before anything is started.
The route to your data starts with the device reaching us. Box it up securely, tuck your contact details inside, and send it across — after the free diagnostic, we put your exact price in writing before a single step is taken.
Sending it by post? Go with a tracked, insured service. Prefer to bring it round? Our door is open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm — just pack the device as described above beforehand.
Prefer to get a sense of things first? Complete the form with a bit more about the fault and an engineer will look it over and send back a tailored quote.
We’ll get back to you soon. Anything pressing, call 01483 901310.
Yes — anything from physically failed drives brought back in the clean-air bench to logical trouble such as a corrupt partition table rebuilt from an image. Whatever the cause, we never write to the original drive.
It starts at £300 plus VAT; most jobs are no fix, no fee, with a fixed quote agreed before any work starts.
No — leave it unformatted and stop using the computer. Your data is very likely still sitting there; it’s the act of formatting, or pressing on regardless, that tends to lose it.
Kick off with an instant online quote, or ring us and talk it through first. Either way you’ll know a clear, fixed price before any work starts.