Case record · Desktop externals · SDR-2025-0334
One Disk Clicks, the Other Fades Out.
Two drives arrived in one parcel with nothing else in common. The first had gone off a shelf during a house move: a 2Tb drive that now clicks and won't show up
, which its owner put down to mechanical failure
, correctly. The second was quieter, growing slower and slower and then disappearing from Explorer
mid-copy, which he guessed was the chip or some software thing
.
Seeing the same thing yourself?
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The translation.
Without the vocabulary for it, he had read both correctly. A fall and then clicking means a head stack that has lost the ability to read servo bursts — a hardware fault, and parts are the only answer. Slowing and then disappearing under load is something else entirely: reads take longer than the controller will wait, the timeout expires, and Windows drops the device rather than sit there. The first wants surgery; the second wants speed. Treat them alike and you burn what little life the fading one has left while the clicker sits in the queue.
Kit used on this job.
What happens in a case →| Platform | Its role in this case | Why we use it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Head map and staged reading on the dropped drive once donor heads were in | Head-map-driven imaging, with per-head timeouts, resets and power-cycle control |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Ran the Iomega's read pass with the timeout control Windows never gives you | The PC-3000 platform's imaging unit, commanded by its firmware unit |
| R-Studio Technician | Rebuilt both filesystems from their images and put the data back together | Wide filesystem support, with RAID rebuilds you can trust |
In the lab.
Split them apart and decide what goes first
The two were assessed on their own terms and queued accordingly. The clicking drive was stable only in the sense that nothing was happening to it — unpowered on a shelf, it could wait without getting worse. The Iomega lost ground every time it was switched on, so it went on the bench first: its window was the one closing.
Copy the fading one before it finishes fading
The weakening drive was imaged with hard limits on how long any single read could take — precisely what Windows will not do. Where the machine had timed out and dropped the drive off the bus, the imager simply noted the slow sector and returned to it later. With the stalls no longer wrecking the whole transfer, most of the disk read at a fair pace.
Then the mechanical one, slowly and properly
The dropped drive took a matched donor stack, a full head map, and an image staged to work the strongest heads first. One surface had been scored where the head came down; the rest were sound, and patience recovered most of what was there.
The result.
Both jobs landed, though not equally. The Iomega gave up almost everything; the dropped drive lost part of one surface and the client folders on it. Two fresh disks went back holding nearly all that two failing ones held.
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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.