A clicking 2.5-inch laptop drive with a student's only copy of a dissertation - recovered head by head.
A student's Acer Aspire began clicking and then refused to boot, with an almost-finished dissertation and no backup sitting on its 2.5-inch hard drive. The timing could hardly have been worse, with a submission deadline approaching. The clicking told us straight away that the heads were failing, and our first advice — as always with a clicking drive — was to stop powering it on, because every attempt to boot drags the failing heads back across the platters and costs more data.
Opened in our clean-air environment, the drive had a head down in the stack. Laptop 2.5-inch drives are tightly packed and unforgiving — the heads sit very close together and the tolerances are small — which makes work on them more delicate than on a desktop drive and makes gentle handling essential.
We fitted a matched donor head set, paired to the drive so the new heads read the platters correctly, and imaged it on a DeepSpar Disk Imager. Working head by head, we secured each healthy surface in full and left the weakest until last, with the imager controlling power and command timeouts so the fragile drive was never pushed too hard. The PC3000 covered the firmware side. This staged approach is what makes the difference on a head-damaged drive: capture the easy data first, then spend the drive's limited remaining life on the difficult areas.
From the image we rebuilt the file system and confirmed the dissertation, its references and the student's wider files opened correctly before writing them to fresh media.
We recovered about 98% of the drive, including the dissertation in full, six working days later — comfortably before the deadline. A hard lesson learned painlessly: coursework should live in at least two places, because a single laptop drive is exactly the kind of thing that fails the week it matters most.
DeepSpar DDI · PC3000 — imaging and recovery carried out in-house. Every job is imaged before any recovery work begins, and the original media 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.
Recovering your data starts with getting the device to us. Pack it safely, add your contact details, and send it over — after we run a free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work begins.
Posting it in? We recommend a tracked, insured service. Prefer to drop it off? You’re welcome Monday–Friday, 9am–5:30pm — please still package the device as above.
If you need more information on our data recovery service, fill out the form with more detail about your issue and an engineer will review it and give you a custom quote.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 0117 332 1137.
Usually, yes. A dead laptop is often a motherboard fault with a perfectly healthy drive — we remove the drive and image it on the PC3000, or recover a failed drive in the clean-air environment.
From £300 plus VAT, no fix, no fee on most jobs, with a fixed written quote first.
Yes, bring the laptop so we can remove and test the drive, especially where the storage is soldered or encrypted.
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.