Case file · Surge damage · BHD-2025-8614
I Had the Cover Off Hunting Stuck Heads.
He told us what he had done before we ever saw the drive. A thunderstorm over Erdington dropped his street's power twice in the space of ten minutes, and when it settled the WD Blue in his desktop sat there tapping once a second and doing nothing else
. A video had told him seized heads make that noise, so the top was off at the kitchen table by ten
. Nothing in there looked out of place, which left him picking between two culprits: the electronics, or the spindle motor
. The cover was what worried us.
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What that means.
Treat that steel cover as one wall of the sealed box, not a hatch over it. Inside, each head flies a few nanometres above a platter turning at speed, a gap far finer than the air in any house will ever be. Undo the screws and the drive usually carries on working for the moment, and that is exactly what misleads people. The bill comes later. Whatever went wrong electrically is still sitting there untouched, and now a layer of ordinary household dust lies across the surfaces holding the pictures.
What did the work here.
The order of the work →| Equipment | The job it did | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Placed the fault on the board rather than the mechanics, and named the failed driver | Gets at the factory service commands that standard ATA cannot carry |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Imaged the surfaces gently, allowing for platters that had met open air | Reads the disk from inside its firmware, using the PC-3000's imager |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Rebuilt the volume and opened the pictures to check | Handles the file systems other tools give up on: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS, Btrfs |
What we did.
The dust comes off before anything else
He did as he was asked: nothing plugged in since, cover screwed back down, the whole thing bagged. Magnified, the upper platter had collected a fair haul — grit and cloth fibres no breather filter would have let past — and every bit of it came off before the motor was allowed to turn. Start a dirty platter spinning and each particle becomes a cutter under the head.
Then find out what the storm broke
Clean surfaces make the readings worth taking. Heads, motor and platters all measured sound, so the fault was electrical, and it was specific: a motor driver chip on the board, killed by the surge. A disk that cannot get up to speed keeps having another go, once a second, and through a metal case that sounds exactly like heads in trouble. He read it fairly. The drive was lying about itself.
Fit the board, then read gently
The electronics came from a donor board of the same revision, with the ROM recovered from the scorched original and moved across; a fresh board lacking that chip has no idea which drive it is on. Imaging ran at reduced speed, retries kept short, because a platter that has breathed kitchen air is never fully trusted. It came through whole.
How it closed.
The scans all came back — three winters spent photographing Erdington and the people who live there. He was nearer to losing the lot than anybody let on at the time. Two copies now, and the Torx set is put away.
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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.