Case file · Desktop externals · SDR-2025-1124
I Ran DMDE and Then It Began Grinding.
Three terabytes, 95% full of music
, coming up as unallocated in Windows
— so the owner turned to software and left DMDE working for a few hours
. The verdict it returned was too many corrupt
, and then the hardware spoke for itself: the disk makes grinding noises
. At which point, in his phrase, it was time to ask a pro
.
Seeing the same thing yourself?
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The translation.
Showing as unallocated was the first sign of a drive already in trouble. What followed is the costly part: a full-surface scan makes a weakening mechanism seek back and forth for hours on end, and heads on their way out rarely last such a session. Grinding is a far darker sound than clicking, because it points to a head touching the platter — which turns a recovery job into a race for whatever surface is still readable.
Kit used on this job.
What happens in a case →| Platform | Its role in this case | Why we use it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Mapped the heads to see which surfaces the long scan had spared | Head-map-driven imaging, with per-head timeouts, resets and power-cycle control |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Salvage imaging, healthiest areas first, with seeking kept to a minimum | The PC-3000 platform's imaging unit, commanded by its firmware unit |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Reassembled the volume and brought the library back inside its folders | Handles the difficult filesystems better than most — APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS, Btrfs |
In the lab.
Work out what the scan had cost him
The head stack carried the wear you see when a drive is run hard while already failing, and the platters showed contact marking — faint across much of the surface, heavier where the scan had spent longest. Calling a halt when he did was the right instinct; a few more hours would have made a real difference to what came back.
Get it reading again, then map before committing to anything
Matched donor parts gave the drive back its ability to read, and a head map showed which surfaces had come through and which had not. The picture was uneven rather than hopeless — most of it readable, with clear bands written off.
Read in salvage mode, with as little head travel as possible
Reading favoured long sequential passes over jumping about, since every move of the actuator across a contact-damaged surface risks carrying debris further. The healthy bands were taken first and taken whole; the marked regions came last, slowly, and with no promises attached.
The result.
Most of the music library came back, with a straight count given against a straight situation and the missing albums traced to the bands the grinding had claimed. What survived did so because he stopped when he did.
Similar cases on the index.
Also from Desktop externals.
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.