The fault · impact and drops
A drive that is switched off is tougher than people expect: the heads sit parked off the platter and the assembly can take a hard landing. Running, head and platter are nanometres apart, with the disc at 5,400 or 7,200rpm and no slack anywhere. Moving or still — that one difference decides most of what follows. So the worst thing to do now is switch it on and see. That first rotation is often the disk's last good chance, and it gets spent on a test that tells you nothing.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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| Symptoms | What is behind it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| It has clicked since the fall | Shock has pushed the heads off track and the drive keeps retrying | Leave it powered down |
| Beeping after the knock | The motor cannot get the platters moving — heads stuck flat to the disc, or a seized bearing | Do not shake it free |
| The machine no longer sees it | Collapsed heads, a spindle motor that will not start, or a broken board or port | Bench inspection, not a retry |
| Worked at first, worsening now | Minor damage that deepens with every hour of use | Act while it still answers |
| A dropped SSD or USB stick that has stopped | Nothing mechanical to break — it will be a joint, a connector or the board | Repair at board level |
Every item gets a case number of its own the day it lands. An engineer then works out what has actually failed and tells you plainly which files have a real chance of coming back and which do not. Only then does a price follow: one figure, fixed, in writing, and it costs you nothing to see it. Nothing is charged until you say yes.
Nothing gets power until an engineer has looked it over, because a bent head finds the platter on the very first turn after a drop. If it is spun at all, that happens once and someone watches it.
Wrecked head stacks come out and matched donors go in, seized spindles are freed, heads stuck to the platter are lifted, boards and sockets repaired.
Everything that reads cleanly is taken off first and put somewhere safe. Only then does the engineer return to the sectors the impact ruined.
No invoice is raised until the full list of recovered files has sat in front of you and you have said go ahead. Your data comes back on media we buy new, posted at our expense, and the job is not closed here until every file has opened on your own machine.
What the manufacturers quote: a 2.5" notebook drive is usually rated near ~300G running and around ~650G parked, while some 3.5" desktop units are given as little as ~30G while the platters turn. Powering a machine down before you pick it up costs you nothing and does more for your files than anything else on this page.
A hard floor at the end of a wedding shoot, and by the first bench test the drive was clicking. Three years of commissioned work were on it. We fitted a donor head stack, imaged for two days, and every gallery came back — the morning's shoot with them.
Most of the time, yes, as long as nothing else has been attempted. Repairing the mechanism for further use is money wasted; getting the files off it is not. Donor heads and patient, low-speed imaging bring back the bulk of a dropped disk.
Worse than a knock while it was off, by a long way. A head flying a few nanometres over a moving platter has nowhere to go when the shock arrives, and it can gouge the coating. Cut the power.
Usually, yes. Nothing in there moves, so the damage shows up as a cracked board, a sheared connector or a solder joint that has let go. That is electrical work, and the flash chips holding your files are normally fine.
Nearly always, yes. A head or a bearing left slightly out of true gets worse on every start-up, so the fall decided the ending and the restarts since have just brought it forward.
Every extra power-up takes something off a drive that is already going. Leave it switched off and let the free diagnosis say what still reads.