A fifteen-year-old drive with tiring heads and thousands of bad sectors, imaged slowly to save what was left.
A home user in Bath asked us to rescue a fifteen-year-old Maxtor DiamondMax holding a lifetime of documents and photographs. The drive still spun and was recognised by the computer, but it had become painfully slow and Windows kept freezing whenever it was accessed. That is the classic picture of an old drive whose heads are wearing out and whose surfaces are filling with bad sectors: it can still be coaxed into reading, but it is on borrowed time and could stop completely at any moment.
On our equipment the drive showed a steadily climbing count of reallocated and pending sectors and long delays on certain regions of the disk — the read channel struggling as ageing heads passed over a degrading surface. There was no single dramatic failure here; rather, the whole drive was tired. With media in that state the priority is clear: take as complete an image as possible, as gently as possible, before the drive gives out for good.
We imaged it on a DeepSpar Disk Imager, which is built for exactly this kind of slow, failing drive. It reads the healthy areas first to secure them, isolates the bad zones so they don't hold up the rest, and carefully controls how hard and how long it pushes the drive on the difficult sectors — coming back for them in multiple passes rather than hammering a weak surface until it dies. The PC3000 handled the drive's firmware where its own defect management had become unreliable. Over several passes the image gradually filled in, recovering more on each run.
From the completed image we rebuilt the file system and checked the recovered documents and a spread of the photographs to confirm they were intact, then wrote the lot to a new drive.
We recovered around 96% of the drive — effectively all of the user's documents and the great majority of the photo library — over eight working days, the extra time reflecting the careful multi-pass imaging a drive this tired needed. Anything sitting on a drive of that age is worth copying off now; the next freeze can easily be the last.
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 — 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.