A fall stalled the spindle and damaged the heads - rebuilt in the clean area and imaged before it could degrade.
A musician's Sony VAIO was dropped and afterwards would only click faintly without ever spinning up. On it were recordings and project files from months of work. A fall is one of the most damaging things that can happen to a hard drive while it is running, and this one had done the classic double: the impact stalled the spindle motor and knocked the heads out of true at the same time. With both the mechanics and the heads affected, every further attempt to power the drive only risked turning a recoverable job into an unrecoverable one, so the right move was to stop and bring it in.
Opened in our clean-air environment, the platter stack would not turn freely and the heads showed damage from the knock. Both faults had to be addressed before the drive could read a single sector, and the order matters — there is no point freeing the motor if the heads can't track the platters afterwards.
In the clean area we freed the platter stack and fitted a matched donor head set, pairing it to the drive so the replacement heads read the surfaces correctly. A drive rebuilt after a seizure is fragile and unpredictable, so imaging was done on a DeepSpar Disk Imager, which kept power and command timeouts under tight control and let us capture the strongest surfaces first before asking anything of the regions the impact had affected. The PC3000 covered the firmware side. Some areas of the platters had taken light surface damage from the event, and damaged media always costs a little data no matter how carefully it is read.
From the image we rebuilt the file system and confirmed the musician's recordings, project files and documents opened and played correctly before writing everything to fresh media.
We recovered about 94% of the drive — the recordings and the great majority of the project files — over eight working days. The episode is the strongest possible argument for backing up creative work as you go: a dropped laptop is a moment's accident, but the recordings on its drive can represent months that can never be repeated.
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.