A failed head took an office PC offline - donor heads and a staged image recovered the lot.
An office in Bristol lost a Dell desktop that began clicking and then disappeared from Windows. The machine held local working files that hadn't yet made it onto the server, so although it was a business setting, the situation was the familiar one: a single drive carrying data that existed nowhere else. The clicking pointed straight at failing heads, and the standard advice applied — stop powering the machine, because each boot attempt drags the failing heads across the platters and costs more data.
Opened on the bench in our clean-air environment, the drive had a head down in the stack. A 3.5-inch desktop drive gives a little more room to work than a laptop drive, but a head crash is a head crash: the failed heads have to be replaced before the drive can read anything, and the exposed platters have to be kept free of contamination throughout.
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 and keeping the load light on a fragile drive, we captured each healthy surface in full before spending the drive's limited remaining life on the weakest areas. The PC3000 covered firmware access. Securing the strongest surfaces first is what gets the most important data off before anything can degrade further.
From the image we rebuilt the file system and confirmed the office's working files opened correctly before writing them to fresh media.
We imaged about 99% of the drive and returned all of the office's working files, six working days on. The practical lesson for any business is to make sure local machines are syncing to the server or a backup automatically — the files that hurt most to lose are usually the ones a member of staff was still working on locally.
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.
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Yes — from failed drives recovered in the clean-air environment to logical faults such as a corrupt partition table rebuilt from an image. We never write to the original drive.
From £300 plus VAT, no fix, no fee on most jobs, with a fixed quote before any work.
Do not format it, and stop using the PC. The data is usually intact; formatting or continued use is what risks losing 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.