Case file · Portable drives · SDR-2025-0319
Slower Every Week, Then It Wouldn't Open.
The slide had a shape the club's secretary set out plainly: it's been getting harder and harder to get at anything
— at first it takes an age to open
, then folders showing nothing inside them, and lately some days it opens and some days it doesn't
. Fifteen years of club records sat on it, and nowhere else.
Seeing the same thing yourself?
0800 6890668
The translation.
That sequence — slow, then partial, then hit and miss — is what a drive looks like when it loses its reading ability piece by piece rather than dying outright. Weak sectors multiply, retries pile up, and Windows stops waiting before the drive does. Folders showing while their contents don't is the telling part: directory records are small and sit close together, whereas file contents are large and scattered, so the failing ground swallows the contents before it touches the index.
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 first, then imaged with timeouts set for the failing one | Head-map-driven imaging, with per-head timeouts, resets and power-cycle control |
| DeepSpar USB Imager | Worked through the eGo's USB bridge with the operating system kept out of the read | Identical controlled reading, this time through a USB bridge |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Put the volume back together and wrote what was recovered to fresh media | Handles the difficult filesystems better than most — APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS, Btrfs |
In the lab.
No poking about — the head map came first
Nothing was browsed when it arrived, because on a drive already trending downwards every read is capital you cannot get back. The head map went first and confirmed what the symptoms had suggested: one head reading markedly worse than the others, its bad ground sitting exactly where the club had been losing files.
Secure the good ground before going near the bad
Imaging ran in passes ordered by how likely each was to succeed: sound heads and clean zones first and quickly, then further into the damaged areas with longer waits and managed resets. By the time the awkward regions came up, the great bulk of the drive was already sitting safely on the imager.
Sweep what remains, then hand it back on new media
The last passes worked the fading head's ground at reduced speed, with power-cycle recovery between stalls. What came back went onto a new drive, folder structure exactly as before, so the committee could connect it and get straight on.
The result.
Most of the drive was captured before the decline went further, and the records came back on fresh media laid out as before. One run of early photographs sat in the worst of the weak head's ground and returned incomplete — listed in writing rather than glossed over.
Similar cases on the index.
Further cases in Portable drives.
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.