A case from the lab’s earlier years, kept because it shows how little the fundamentals change. A customer’s drive arrived unreadable; diagnosis found a read/write head failure — the mechanical assembly that flies over the platters had died, leaving perfectly healthy data unreachable. The customer chose the standard service, the economical route.
The remedy then is the remedy now: a donor head assembly from a matching drive, transplanted under clean-air conditions, followed immediately by a full image of the drive while the borrowed heads held. The completed recovery was verified file by file and — in the fashion of the day — written out to data DVDs for return, the era’s trusted delivery medium. The whole job, intake to hand-back, ran inside 48 hours on the standard track.
100% of the hard drive’s data was recovered. The DVDs have since given way to new external drives and secure transfers, and the imaging rigs have grown considerably cleverer — but the anatomy of this case is identical to head-swap jobs the bench ran last week: mechanical failure, donor parts, image fast, verify everything. Twenty-plus years of that repetition is the experience the free diagnostic is built on.
Head failures remain the most common serious mechanical fault — and head transplants remain routine bench work. The hard drive page translates the clicking that usually announces them. The first step never changes: a free diagnostic and a fixed written quote before anything is at stake — or call 0131 202 0491 and describe what happened.