A crashed head had dropped the drive off Windows with nothing backed up behind it — here’s the step-by-step of getting it all back.
The drive arrived after a day of clicking followed by silence — it had simply stopped appearing in Windows. A 2 TB Barracuda holding well over a decade of family photographs and, as is so often the way, nothing copied anywhere else. The symptoms pointed straight at a head crash.
Opened up on the bench, the picture was clear: one of the heads in the stack had failed, and the platter surface it flies over was just starting to show the marks of the contact. You can’t image a drive in that condition — a dead head reads nothing and a damaged one only scratches the surface further — so the heads have to come out and be replaced first. That work is done in our in-house clean-air environment, where the platters can be opened without airborne dust settling on them and causing fresh scoring.
We matched a donor drive and moved a compatible head assembly across, choosing it by firmware revision and preamplifier type so the replacements tracked the platters accurately. With the drive reading again, imaging ran on the DeepSpar Disk Imager — our first choice for any head-damaged disk, because it works one head at a time, maps the unstable regions and returns to them on later passes, and keeps spin-up, power and timeouts on a tight leash so a fragile drive is never pushed over the edge. We left the marked surface until last, banking every strong head in full before asking the weakest one to read a thing. The PC3000 handled the trips into the drive’s firmware and service area where they were needed.
With the image as full as the surface would give up, the file system was rebuilt from that copy — the original was never written to — and we spot-checked it by opening a broad sample of the recovered photos and videos to be sure they were whole rather than half-written. Everything was then copied onto a fresh drive, ready to use.
A little over 99% of the drive imaged, and in practical terms every photograph, scan and video the family cared about came home — six working days after it landed with us. The takeaway we always pass on: clicking is the sound of a drive failing mechanically, so the kindest thing you can do is switch it off and get it to someone; and once it’s back, keep a second copy, because a drive gives no warning the second time.
DeepSpar DDI · PC3000 — head replacement, imaging and file-system rebuild all carried out in-house. The drive is imaged before any recovery begins, 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 — clicking, dropped and dead drives are the job we do most. A clicking drive usually needs its heads replaced in our clean-air environment before it can be imaged on the DeepSpar and PC3000, always working from a copy rather than the original.
It starts at £300 plus VAT, and most jobs are no fix, no fee. You’ll always have a fixed price in writing before any work begins.
No — every power-up of a clicking drive risks turning a recoverable head fault into scored platters. Power it down and send it in rather than retrying 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.