A drive left powered off for months returned with its heads stuck fast to the platters. Here's how they were freed.
A small business in Benwell dug an old Hitachi Deskstar out of a drawer to fetch a few years of archived accounts, plugged it in, and got only a faint buzz before silence. The drive had sat unused for a long stretch — precisely the setup that produces this fault. A disk that tries to spin and then stalls usually has stiction: the read/write heads have settled onto the platter surface and stuck fast, and the motor just isn't strong enough to break them loose. Forcing it — repeated power cycles, a knock, some freezer trick off the internet — risks shearing the heads off or scoring the platters, so it reached us untouched.
Opening the drive in our clean-air environment confirmed stiction rather than a crash: the heads had come to rest on the platters, not on their ramp, and were clinging there. The platters themselves looked clean. With a stuck-head drive the key question is always whether the heads have survived the event, because freeing them carelessly is exactly what destroys them.
Using the proper tooling we eased the heads off the platter surface, lifting them clear without dragging, and checked them under magnification. They'd survived intact — but a drive rescued from stiction is left fragile and is best read at once. We imaged it on a DeepSpar Disk Imager, which controls the spin-up and holds power and command timeouts in check so a delicate drive isn't stressed, mapping any slow zones to revisit rather than stalling on them. The PC3000 stood by for the firmware side. The image came off cleanly, only a handful of sectors needing a second pass.
With a full image in hand we rebuilt the file system from the copy and checked the accounts files and correspondence opened correctly before writing it all 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 landed. The broader 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.
Getting your data back begins with getting the device to us. Pack it up safely, pop your contact details inside, and send it over — once we’ve run the free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work starts.
Posting it? A tracked, insured service is what we’d recommend. Rather drop it in? You’re welcome Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm — just package the device up as above first.
Want a bit more detail first? Fill in the form with more about your issue and an engineer will review it and send 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 alongside the PC3000, always working from a copy.
Hard drive recovery starts at £300 plus VAT, with no fix, no fee on most jobs. You get a fixed written quote before any work starts.
No. Every power-on of a clicking or failing drive risks fresh 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.