Case record · Portable drives · SDR-2025-0635
Its Read/Write Head Is Bent.
He had done the diagnosis himself before writing. The drive sat on the desk and was still plugged in when it went over the edge, and his message led with the verdict: I think the head is bent
and it'll need a new one
. Worse, it was bought used, had been a bit temperamental
for months, and held the only copy of three years of site photographs.
Seeing the same thing yourself?
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The translation.
He was right on every count, which deserves saying out loud. A bent head cannot be bent back into anything you would trust — flying height is set in the factory to tolerances no workshop can restore, so the stack gets replaced with a matched donor and that is that. What stays genuinely uncertain after any fall is the platter surface. A head that touched down while the disk was turning leaves marks no replacement stack can read through, and nobody honest predicts that before the drive is open.
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 after the donor swap, showing which surfaces survived | Head-map-driven imaging, with per-head timeouts, resets and power-cycle control |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Imaging staged so the damaged band was left until the very last passes | The PC-3000 platform's imaging unit, commanded by its firmware unit |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Pulled the defect log at firmware level — telling, on a drive with a second-hand past | Talks to drives using maker-specific commands beyond the ordinary ATA instruction set |
In the lab.
Look at the platters before making anyone a promise
The head stack was bent, exactly as he said. The surfaces beneath it mattered more. Contact marks sat in a narrow band where the impact had landed, but this was not the deep circular scoring that ends a job. The drive's earlier temperament proved separate: weak regions it had carried since well before the fall.
Fit a matched stack, then map it truthfully
A donor assembly of the correct family and firmware generation went in, and a full surface map was built before any bulk reading began. Two trouble areas showed up: the band left by the impact, and the drive's older weak regions. Different causes, and both had to be worked around.
Read around both faults, worst areas last
Everything healthy was imaged first and finished completely. The impact band and the older weak zones were then approached at low speed with controlled resets, and a good share of each came back — without leaning on a mechanism that had already hit the floor once.
The result.
Most of the drive came back: everything the platters still carried, set out plainly against what they no longer did, with a written map of the damaged band. One folder of site photographs went with it. For a used drive dropped mid-copy with no second copy anywhere, a better ending than the odds allowed for.
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.