A Toshiba external went on the floor and never worked again. A local shop opened the enquiry far enough to say there was a broken component inside and that removing it without wrecking the data needed somebody with the right kit. That shop was right, and there is no point pretending otherwise: a dropped drive with something broken inside almost always means the head assembly, and heads are replaced in a clean-air enclosure or not at all. The data is not in the broken part. It is on the platters underneath, and the platters usually come through a fall intact. What ruins them is what happens next — the owner plugging it in again to check, and again, while wrecked heads scrape across the surface the files are written on.
| Media | Toshiba external hard drive, dropped, dead afterwards. A shop had already established that a component inside the sealed drive was broken. |
| Reported situation | Toshiba external · fell and stopped working · shop found a broken internal component · told it needed specialist removal without harming the data · recovery sought. |
| Fault class | Mechanical damage from impact. The head assembly inside the sealed casing is broken; the platters holding the data are normally unharmed. Reached by fitting matched donor heads under laminar flow. Repeat power-ups are the hazard, not the fall. |
| Equipment used | Not powered again once the fall was described · lifted out of its enclosure and profiled on a current-limited supply, the behaviour on spin-up assessed · opened under laminar flow in filtered air, head stack and platter surfaces examined under the microscope at magnification, the damaged assembly swapped for matched donors and alignment set · imaged on DeepSpar with PC-3000 UDMA driving the drive, the data assembled and checked in R-Studio. |
Start with what a broken part inside actually means. A hard drive has very few moving pieces: a spindle turning the platters, and an arm carrying the read/write heads across them. Drop it while it is running and the heads land on the surface. Drop it while it is parked and the arm can still be knocked out of true. Either way the shop's phrase — a broken component that cannot simply be removed — is a fair description of a head assembly that has failed.
The important point is what the fault does not touch. Heads read the data; they do not hold it. The files are magnetic patterns on the platters, and a fall that kills the heads leaves those patterns exactly where they were. So the honest position at the outset is that a dropped drive is usually recoverable, and the thing that decides how much comes back is not the fall but the number of times it was powered up afterwards.
That is the part worth being blunt about. Every attempt to see whether it works now sends damaged heads out over the platters. A drive that was switched off straight away and boxed generally comes back complete. A drive that got tried once a day for a fortnight comes back in pieces, because by then the surface has been scored and no equipment on earth reads a scratch. If you have already done that, say so — it changes what we expect, not whether we take the job.
Working out which of those two you have costs nothing. The free assessment is done inside 2 working days of the box landing here, and it ends with a phone call and one written figure. Head work means opening the drive, so it is priced as physical work: 50% of that figure before the clean-air stage, the balance only if the data comes back.
It was not powered on arrival, because the history said impact and the shop's finding said mechanical. It was taken out of its enclosure and run from a bench supply with the current limited so the spin-up could be watched without letting it run. It was then opened under laminar flow and inspected under the microscope at magnification: the heads had failed, the platters were clean. A matched donor head stack was fitted, the alignment set, and the drive imaged on DeepSpar with PC-3000 UDMA driving it. The file system was rebuilt in R-Studio from the image and the files opened and checked rather than merely counted.
Heads swapped under laminar flow, the drive imaged, the data brought back onto fresh media. The assessment cost nothing and ended with one fixed written figure, VAT included before any of it began. Because the casing had to be opened, this ran as physical work: half the quote settled before the clean-air stage, the balance owed only on the result. The shop that sent it on had read the fault correctly, and saying so costs us nothing — a trade referral that arrives already switched off is worth a great deal more than one that arrives after a fortnight of testing.
Take the diagnosis seriously and stop there. A broken part inside a sealed drive means the mechanism, and the mechanism is only serviceable in clean air with matched donor parts. Do not plug it in to check. Do not shake it, do not freeze it, and do not let anybody open it on a workbench to have a look, because a single particle of ordinary room dust on a platter does damage at the scale these things work at. Put it in a padded box, write down what happened and when, and send it. The platters are almost certainly fine; how much comes off them depends almost entirely on how many times it was asked to try again.
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.
A socket that has been strained once and then yanked has failed at the connection, and the drive is read past it rather than through it
A drive that tries to start and gets no further has failed at the heads — the light and the noise are the last two things it can still do
Once you have tried it on everything, the process of elimination is finished — the fault is in the drive and it needs reading at its own level
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.