A drive left switched off for months came back with its heads stuck fast to the platters. Here's how it was freed.
A small business in Bedminster pulled an old Hitachi Deskstar out of a drawer to retrieve a few years of archived accounts, plugged it in and got nothing but a faint buzz followed by silence. The drive had sat unused for a long time, which is exactly the scenario that produces this fault. A disk that tries to spin and then stalls usually has stiction: the read/write heads have settled down onto the platter surface and effectively stuck fast, and the motor simply isn't strong enough to break them free. Forcing it — repeated power cycles, a knock, a freezer trick from the internet — risks tearing the heads off or scoring the platters, so it came straight to us untouched.
Opening the drive in our clean-air environment confirmed stiction rather than a crash: the heads were parked down on the platters, not on their ramp, and were holding on. The platters themselves looked clean. The key question with a stuck-head drive is always whether the heads have survived the event, because freeing them carelessly is what destroys them.
We gently released the heads from the platter surface using the proper tooling, lifting them clear without dragging, and inspected them under magnification. They had come through intact, but a drive recovered from stiction is left fragile and is best read straight away. We imaged it on a DeepSpar Disk Imager, which manages the spin-up and keeps power and command timeouts under control so a delicate drive isn't stressed, and maps any slow zones to revisit rather than stalling on them. The PC3000 was on hand for the firmware side. The image came off cleanly, with only a handful of sectors needing a second pass.
With a full image taken we rebuilt the file system from the copy and confirmed the accounts files and correspondence opened correctly before writing everything to fresh media.
Every archived file came back — the accounts, years of correspondence and a folder of scanned records — five working days after the drive arrived. The wider point for any business: a drive left switched off for years is not a backup, and old media is best copied onto something current while it still spins.
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 — clicking, dropped, dead and firmware-fault drives are our most common job. We replace failed heads in our clean-air environment and image on a DeepSpar with the PC3000, working only from a copy.
Hard drive recovery is from £300 plus VAT, with no fix, no fee on most jobs. You get a fixed written quote before any work begins.
No. Every power-on of a clicking or failing drive risks more damage. Switch it off and bring it in, or post it to us.
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.