Data Recovery Case File · Desktop Externals & Aging Drives · Two To Three Feet
Chimed, listed, ejectable — and empty: the after-drop half-presence decoded, the heads treated for the fall they took, and 1.81 honest terabytes read back
The tone was cheerful; the physics was not. His 2TB Western Digital external — "actual capacity is 1.81TB," he noted, with a precision this page rewards below — "slid off the top of my PC tower last night on to the floor (2–3ft), hitting the bottom corner of the drive, which now no longer seems to want to work." His observations were exact: "the light on the drive comes on, as does the PC's chime upon connecting the USB — but nothing else happens. I can right-click and select 'safely remove it' before unplugging, so it's being identified." Half to three-quarters full, and a straightforward request: "just wondering about costing to get it sorted." The decode owes him three things: what a corner-first landing from desk height actually does inside a drive; why "identified but absent" is the signature of a mechanism, not a cable; and the answer to the small mystery he flagged in passing — where his missing nineteen hundredths of a terabyte went.
| Media | Western Digital 2TB external (1.81TB formatted, as the owner precisely observed) — half to three-quarters full of accumulated files |
| Reported incident | Slid from the top of a PC tower, roughly two to three feet, landing on a bottom corner · since then: power light on, USB connection chime, "safely remove" offered — but no accessible drive · no further attempts pressed |
| Fault class | Impact injury to the head assembly — enclosure electronics healthy and answering; the mechanism behind them unable to serve |
| Equipment used | Laminar flow bench inspection of heads and platter surfaces · donor head assembly fitted · hardware imaging with the impact-adjacent regions handled last · verified extraction |
The decode: the corner, the chime, and the missing 0.19TB
Why corners are the cruellest landing: a flat drop spreads its arrival across a whole face; a corner concentrates the same energy into a point and drives it as a shock-spike through the chassis — straight to the most delicate residents, the heads, parked microns from surfaces they must never strike. Two to three feet is well inside injury range for a spinning-drive mechanism. The commonest casualty profile is exactly what his symptoms sketch: heads damaged or knocked out of true, platters usually — though not automatically — surviving. The bench's first job on any drop is to open under the laminar flow bench and let the surfaces testify before the drive is ever allowed to try.
The chime, correctly read: his deduction — "so it's being identified" — was right, and worth sharpening. What the computer identified was the enclosure's USB electronics: the interpreter at the door, unbruised by the fall, answering the register and politely offering its eject option. The drive behind the interpreter never reached ready, so no storage ever appeared. Light, chime and eject menu are the front-of-house running normally over a stage that can't perform — presence at the interface, absence at the mechanism. On a drive that fell last night, that pattern says: stop connecting it, which he had.
The 1.81 mystery, solved as promised: nothing is missing. Drive makers count in round decimal billions; operating systems count in binary steps — and two decimal terabytes, translated into the computer's arithmetic, come out at 1.81. His "actual capacity" note was the observation of someone who reads what his equipment tells him; the gap is a translation artefact, not lost ground, and every byte of it was still in play below.
The recovery: inspected first, transplanted, harvested corner-last
Under the laminar flow bench, the fall's account was read directly: the head assembly had taken the shock and would not fly true again; the platter surfaces, inspected across their expanse and especially toward the impact side, had escaped scoring. A matched donor head assembly was fitted, and the drive went straight to hardware imaging — the broad healthy expanse harvested first, the regions nearest the impact's geography saved for last and read with extra patience. The image completed; the volume mounted from the copy; and his half-to-three-quarters estimate proved almost exactly right.
The outcome
The full estate delivered verified on new media, with a plain-English account of the fall, the transplant, and the innocent arithmetic behind his missing 0.19TB. Costing was answered the standing way: free assessment, one fixed written figure including VAT, 50% of parts and labour upfront with the balance only on success. The tower's summit was retired as a parking spot by mutual agreement — desk-height gravity having now made its one allowed demonstration.
Drive dropped — light on, chime plays, but it never appears
Read that pattern correctly: the enclosure is answering, the mechanism isn't — and after a fall, that means heads. Stop connecting it; every power-up asks injured components to fly over surfaces they may now touch. Don't be reassured by lights, chimes or eject menus, and don't try it "on another computer" — the interpreter will answer there too, and prove nothing. Corners multiply drops; parking drives on top of towers offers gravity a standing invitation. Fallen drives go from floor to laminar flow bench, with nothing in between.
That's a mechanism injury — call Edinburgh Data Recovery on 0131 202 0491; inspected under the laminar flow bench, one written figure.
Request a quote online →
Our case files are drawn from genuine enquiries received by our laboratory over the past ten years, anonymised to protect client confidentiality. Each one describes the diagnostic and recovery procedure our engineers apply to that fault, using the equipment listed.