Tiring heads and thousands of bad sectors on a fifteen-year-old drive, coaxed through a slow, patient image to save what remained.
A Guildford homeowner came to us with a Maxtor DiamondMax that was fifteen years old and still the only home for a lifetime of paperwork and family photos. It hadn’t died outright — it powered up and the PC could see it — but everything about it had slowed to a crawl, and the machine hung the instant anyone opened a folder on it. That behaviour is just what you’d expect from a drive of that vintage: the heads are past their best and the platters are collecting unreadable patches, so it limps along and worsens with every use.
Our tools showed the story plainly — reallocated and pending sector counts creeping upward, and the drive stalling for seconds at a time whenever it crossed certain areas. Nothing had catastrophically broken; it had simply worn out. When a disk is in that condition the plan writes itself: pull off the most complete copy you can while treating the drive as gently as possible, because every pass takes a little more out of it.
For this we used the DeepSpar, which exists precisely for tired, marginal drives. It grabs the strong regions first so they’re secured, fences off the failing patches so a single bad spot can’t stall the whole read, and throttles how hard and how long the drive is pushed across the awkward zones — revisiting them over several passes instead of flogging a dying surface in one go. With a disk this worn, going slowly is what brings the data back.
Once the imaging finished we reconstructed the file system from the copy, confirmed the documents and a good cross-section of the photos opened properly, and wrote everything out to a replacement drive.
Effectively all of the documents and the great majority of the photo collection were recovered, though it took eight working days — the patient, repeated passes a surface in that state demands simply take time. The wider point applies to anyone: if it lives on a drive that old, copy it off now, because the freeze you shrug at today may be the one it doesn’t come back from.
DeepSpar DDI · PC3000 — imaged in repeated passes and rebuilt on our bench. The original is copied first and 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.
Usually. On an ageing disk, sluggishness and hangs mean worn heads and failing sectors; we image it slowly across several passes on the DeepSpar to lift as much as the surface will surrender. Because we work from the copy, the tired drive isn’t pushed any harder.
It begins at £300 plus VAT, the majority of jobs are no fix, no fee, and a fixed quote is agreed in writing before we start.
No — each read off a decaying surface can lose you data that was still within reach. Power it down and get it to us while the maximum amount can still be recovered.
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.