Logical & corruption · case file · BHD-2025-8311
Every Copy Ended in a Cyclic Redundancy Check.
The Toshiba had spent years in a dock on a shelf behind the office desk. A power cut soured it: any copy of any size died at the same message — cyclic redundancy check
— the odd file to begin with, then whole folders. He changed the lead, took it through to the works laptop, and set Windows checking it overnight twice, and it was still grinding away at eight both times
. On it sat thirty years of shop drawings from a Nechells fabricator: every stair, every railing and every cut list I have ever done
.
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What that means.
Read the message plainly and it says one thing only: the drive handed back a block of data, and the tally stored alongside that block did not add up. Nothing beyond that. Two very different faults end at the same sentence. A muddled filesystem on sound hardware throws it; so does a platter losing its grip on what was written there. Treat one like the other and you pay for the mistake. Windows answers a weak patch by hammering at it until the sector reads or the drive stops, and he had handed it two nights to do exactly that.
What did the work here.
The order of the work →| Equipment | The job it did | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Copied the Toshiba under a hard retry ceiling, marking stubborn zones and moving on | Head mapping first, then one surface at a time, with resets, timeouts and power all governed |
| R-Studio Technician | Rebuilt the volume from the image, never from the drive | Broad file-system support, with RAID rebuilds that can be trusted |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Read the firmware before anything else: attribute trend, grown defect list, and the two marathon power-on sessions | Gets at the factory service commands that standard ATA cannot carry |
What we did.
Let the drive's own log answer the question
Not one sector came off the platters until the firmware had been questioned, and the answers left no room for argument. Reallocated sectors were already numerous and still rising, with more queued and waiting their turn. Two enormous power-on sessions matched the two nights of Windows checking, hour for hour. Hardware, then. Not a filesystem in a tangle.
Every retry costs something, so budget them
The terms were agreed before the pass started: short timeouts, a hard limit on attempts, and anything that dug its heels in logged and skipped rather than fought over. Those skipped bands got one brief revisit right at the close. The sums decide it. Wrestle a single bad sector for an hour and the thousand good ones queued behind it may never come off at all.
Shut the drive down and work off the image
Once the image was on disk the Toshiba stayed switched off for good. The copy read better than expected: the whole folder tree was there, and everything lost sat inside a single band, where the failing patch lay beneath a batch of scanned sheets. Each of those went into the log by name, so what he got was a list he could tick off against the plan chest, not a vague apology.
How it closed.
He had named his priority folder on the phone — the stair and balustrade drawings for buildings still standing — and that folder was opened and checked before anyone talked about invoices. The archive went back on a fresh disk, complete but for the sheets named in the report. Two he can redraw from paper still in the office; the rest cover work done before he bought the business, and that paper was skipped long ago.
Other pages worth a look here.
Others under Logical & corruption.
Is yours behaving the same way?
Switch the device off, post it in, and decide nothing until the diagnosis comes back to tell you where you stand.