Case record · Electrical damage · SDR-2025-0614
I Unscrewed the Lid to Inspect the Heads.
Candour shortens a case, and this owner offered it in full: the WD Blue started ticking after the power went out
, so he opened it up on the kitchen table to look at the heads
. None of them looked stuck, which left him torn between the board or maybe the motor
. The logic was decent enough. The lid on the worktop was the trouble.
Seeing the same thing yourself?
0800 6890668
The translation.
The heads on a current drive ride above the platters at a height measured in nanometres — narrower than a particle of smoke, and far narrower than the dust in any kitchen. That lid is not a cover; it is one wall of a sealed, filtered space. Taking it off at home does not wreck a drive on the spot, but it does turn a one-fault job into a two-fault job: whatever the power cut did, plus whatever drifted down while the drive lay open.
Kit used on this job.
What happens in a case →| Platform | Its role in this case | Why we use it |
|---|---|---|
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Showed the outage damage to be electronic, once the dust had been dealt with | Talks to drives using maker-specific commands beyond the ordinary ATA instruction set |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Copied the drive on settings picked for platters that had been left open | The PC-3000 platform's imaging unit, commanded by its firmware unit |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Put the volume back and confirmed the files opened | Handles the difficult filesystems better than most — APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS, Btrfs |
In the lab.
Handle the dust before the original fault
It reached us sealed inside the bag we had asked him to use. The exposure was addressed before anything else: platters and head sliders examined for settled particles, and for the scoring a dirty slider will carve the moment the disk turns again. Take those steps in the wrong order and household dust becomes permanent damage within seconds.
Locate the actual fault, one component along
Once the surfaces were clear, the ticking pointed at the board and not the mechanism. The outage had taken out electronics, and a drive unable to start up cleanly made the very noise he had read as heads glued to a platter. His thinking held together well. He had simply landed one part short.
Rebuild the board, then read gently
The board was put right with the drive's own ROM carried across to it, and the copy taken on cautious settings; a surface that has been open to the room earns care even when it inspects clean. The read finished without drama.
The result.
Everything came back, and it came nearer to not doing so than he will enjoy hearing. The photographs returned whole. His Torx set has been retired to flat-pack duty.
Similar cases on the index.
Others in Electrical damage.
Does this sound like your own drive?
The rule holds as in every case above: switch it off, and let a free diagnosis come before any decision.