A fifteen-year-old drive with tiring heads and thousands of bad sectors, imaged slowly to salvage what was left.
A home user in Durham 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 turned painfully slow and Windows froze whenever it was touched. That's 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's on borrowed time and could stop completely at any moment.
On our equipment the drive showed a steadily rising count of reallocated and pending sectors, plus long delays over certain regions — the read channel struggling as ageing heads passed across a degrading surface. There was no single dramatic failure here; the whole drive was simply tired. With media in that shape the aim is obvious: capture as full an image as we can, as gently as we can, before the drive quits 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 leans on the drive over the difficult sectors — returning for them in several passes rather than hammering a weak surface until it dies. The PC3000 handled the drive's firmware where its own defect management had grown unreliable. Over successive 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 were intact, then wrote the lot to a new drive.
We pulled back the drive's contents — in practice every one of the user's documents and the bulk of the photo library — across eight working days, the extra time down to the patient multi-pass imaging a drive this worn demanded. 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.
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.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 0191 406 1051.
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.