A 2TB SATA drive that spins up perfectly and reads nothing. A computer firm had it open far enough to establish that the actuator arm had failed, sent it on rather than trying anything clever, and the customer had already bought a fresh drive for the data to go onto. That is a sound diagnosis and exactly the right response to it. The arm is what carries the read/write heads across the platters. If it has failed, the disk can turn all day and never position a head over anything useful, so the drive looks alive and behaves as though it were empty. The data is untouched underneath. Getting to it means opening the casing under laminar flow and fitting a matched head-and-arm assembly, which is not a workshop job and never has been.
| Media | 2TB SATA hard drive. Platters spinning normally, actuator arm failed, so no data can be read. Examined and referred on by a computer firm. |
| Reported situation | 2TB SATA drive · examined by a computer firm · disc spinning but actuator arm failed · referred to a specialist · fresh drive bought ready for the transfer · recovery sought. |
| Fault class | Head fault. The actuator arm carrying the heads has failed, so the platters turn but the heads cannot be positioned to read. The data is normally intact on the platters and is reached by replacing the head-and-arm assembly with matched donors under laminar flow. |
| Equipment used | The firm's finding reviewed and confirmed on a bench supply with the current limited behind PC-3000 UDMA, spin-up and head positioning watched · opened under laminar flow in filtered air, with the head stack and the platter surfaces examined at magnification, the head-and-arm assembly replaced with matched donors and alignment set · imaged on DeepSpar, data located and validated in R-Studio, then written to the customer's own fresh drive. |
A hard drive has two motors. The spindle motor turns the platters at a constant speed, and the voice coil actuator swings the arm carrying the heads in and out across them. They are independent. Losing the second while the first still works produces exactly what was described: a drive that sounds entirely healthy and reads nothing at all.
This is why spin is a poor guide to health. People take a spinning drive as a good sign, and quite reasonably, because a silent drive is usually a worse one. But spin only tells you the spindle and its driver are fine. Whether the heads can find the servo pattern and settle on a track is a separate mechanism with its own failure modes.
Replacing a head-and-arm assembly is careful work rather than clever work. The donor has to be a genuine match — same family, same firmware generation, compatible head map — because heads are calibrated to the mechanism they were built into. It is done under laminar flow because a particle of ordinary dust on a platter is enormous at the flying height these things work at. And alignment has to be set, because a fractional error means the new heads read nothing either.
The firm that referred it did the customer a real service by stopping. The common alternative is a workshop opening the drive on a bench to have a look, which contaminates the platters and turns a routine recovery into a salvage job. Buying a fresh drive in advance was sensible too — recovered data always goes to new media, never back onto the failed drive.
The referring firm's finding was reviewed rather than assumed: the drive went onto a bench supply with the current limited behind PC-3000 UDMA, where the spin-up was confirmed as normal and the head positioning behaviour observed. It matched the diagnosis. The drive was then opened under laminar flow in filtered air, and the heads and the platter surfaces examined at magnification — the platters were sound, which is what makes this class of job predictable. A matched donor head-and-arm assembly was fitted and alignment set. It was then imaged on DeepSpar, the data assembled and checked in R-Studio, and the result written to the fresh drive the customer had already provided.
Failed assembly swapped under laminar flow, the drive then imaged, and the data written onto the customer's own new drive. The assessment cost nothing and ended with one fixed written figure, VAT included before the casing was opened. Head work is physical work and consumes a donor drive and bench hours, so half of it was settled before the clean-air stage with the balance owed only on the result. The referral deserves its credit: the drive arrived unopened, undisturbed and switched off, which is the condition that makes this kind of recovery straightforward instead of marginal.
Leave it exactly as it is. Spinning is not a reason to try it once more, and a drive whose arm has failed will not improve with another attempt. Do not let anybody open it outside clean air, however carefully they intend to look, because contamination on the platters is permanent and it is the difference between a full recovery and a partial one. Do not send the whole computer either; the bare drive is what travels. Buying a fresh drive for the recovered data in advance is genuinely helpful and speeds up the return — but never ask for the data to be written back to the failed drive, whatever anybody tells you about it working fine afterwards.
Each file below comes from a genuine enquiry taken from households and firms across Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire and the wider north-east, anonymised so nobody can be identified. Each one sets out how the fault was reasoned through, what was done about it, and which equipment did the work.
An IT firm that stops and refers a failing drive on has done the right thing — the drive is imaged in measured passes, not read until it dies
A repair shop that runs the tests, finds a mechanical failure and refuses to go further has done the job properly by stopping
Beeping after a fall is a seized mechanism, and the friend read it correctly — but the drive has been opened, and that has to be accounted for
Assessment is free and takes 2 working days at most once it lands, the figure is fixed in writing, and logical work carries no fix no fee. Begin online, or lift the phone.