A fall jammed the spindle and parked the heads on the platters - freed and imaged before more damage could be done.
An Iomega external drive was knocked off a desk and afterwards would only buzz briefly without ever spinning up. The fall had done two things at once: it seized the spindle motor and left the heads resting down on the platters. That combination is about the worst position a drive can be in, and it gets worse every second the drive is powered, so the owner did exactly the right thing by stopping immediately and bringing it in.
We shelled the bare drive out of its external enclosure — the USB interface was irrelevant here, the fault was purely mechanical — and opened it in our clean-air environment. The platter stack would not turn freely and the heads had taken a knock from the impact. Both the motor seizure and the head damage had to be dealt with before the drive could read anything.
In the clean area we freed the platter stack and fitted a matched donor head set, pairing it carefully to the drive so the new heads tracked the platters correctly. A drive rebuilt after a mechanical seizure is delicate and unpredictable, so imaging was done on a DeepSpar Disk Imager, keeping the load light, controlling power and timeouts, and capturing the strongest surfaces first before asking anything of the areas the impact had affected. The PC3000 was available for firmware access throughout.
From the image we rebuilt the file system and confirmed the owner's photos, documents and music opened correctly before writing them to fresh media.
We imaged about 95% of the drive and returned the great majority of the owner's files, seven working days on. A dropped drive that buzzes or won't spin should never be powered again in the hope it comes back to life — each attempt does more damage. Powered down and brought straight in, as this one was, gives the best possible chance.
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.
Yes. We take the bare drive out of its enclosure and recover it directly, handling head damage in the clean-air environment and any hardware encryption from the enclosure's bridge.
From £300 plus VAT, no fix, no fee on most jobs, with a fixed quote up front.
Stop powering it. A dropped drive that clicks or will not spin is damaged mechanically, so bring 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.