A failed head had taken an office PC down mid-week — donor heads and a staged image brought the working files back.
This Dell desktop belonged to a small office, and it had been deteriorating for a while — read errors, the odd blue screen — before it gave up booting completely. The drive was in a bad way, and what mattered most was the work staff kept on their own machines: the in-progress files that hadn’t yet been saved up to the server.
Once it was open on the bench, inside the clean-air environment, the cause was a failed head in the stack. There’s marginally more room to manoeuvre inside a 3.5-inch desktop drive than a laptop one, but that changes nothing about the procedure: until the dead heads are swapped out the drive reads nothing, and for as long as it’s open the platters can’t be allowed to pick up any contamination.
The fix was a donor head set matched to this specific drive, so that once fitted the heads sat and read correctly, followed by imaging on the DeepSpar. The imager treats a damaged drive gently — holding back on power draw and command timeouts — and lets us work surface by surface, so we pulled every strong head off in full and left the compromised areas until the end. Front-loading the good surfaces means the data that matters is already safe by the time the drive is asked to attempt its worst regions. The PC3000 looked after the firmware.
With the image made, we rebuilt the file system from it and opened a selection of the office’s live documents to confirm they were intact, then copied the recovered data out to a fresh drive.
Roughly 99% of the drive was captured and the office got all of its working files back, six working days after it came in. If there’s a takeaway for a business, it’s to have staff machines back up or sync to the server on their own — because the files people grieve over are nearly always the ones still sitting unsaved on a local desktop.
DeepSpar DDI · PC3000 — heads replaced and the drive imaged and rebuilt on our bench. A copy is taken first and the original is never written to.
Send us your device for a free diagnostic, and tell us a little about what happened — an engineer will review it and confirm your exact quote in writing before any work begins.
Getting your data back begins with getting the device to us. Pack it up safely, pop your contact details inside, and send it over — once we’ve run the free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work starts.
Posting it? A tracked, insured service is what we’d recommend. Rather drop it in? You’re welcome Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm — just package the device up as above first.
Want a bit more detail first? Fill in the form with more about your issue and an engineer will review it and send you a custom quote.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 01483 901310.
Yes — whether the drive has physically failed and needs work in the clean-air environment, or it’s a logical fault like a damaged partition table rebuilt from an image. The original drive is only ever read, never written to.
From £300 plus VAT, with most jobs on a no fix, no fee basis and a fixed quote agreed before any work.
No — if the drive is failing, each boot can cost you more sectors. Power it down and let the drive be imaged rather than repeatedly restarting a machine that’s struggling to read it.
Start with an instant online quote, or call and talk it through with us first. You'll have a clear, fixed price before any work begins.