Case file · Electrical damage · BDR-2025-0614
I Took the Lid Off to Check the Heads.
Honesty makes cases easier, and this owner was completely honest: the BarraCuda started clicking after a power failure
, so he took the lid off to see if the heads were stuck
. They weren't visibly stuck, leaving him suspecting either the board or the motor
. The reasoning was sound. The open lid was the problem.
Same symptoms on your desk?
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The decode.
A modern drive flies its heads over the platters at a gap measured in nanometres — smaller than a smoke particle, very much smaller than household dust. The lid is not a cover, it's part of a sealed, filtered environment. Opening one on a kitchen table doesn't destroy a drive instantly, but it converts a single-fault case into a two-fault case: whatever the power cut broke, plus whatever settled on the platters while the lid was off.
Equipment on this case.
How a case runs →| Platform | What it did here | Why this tool |
|---|---|---|
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Established that the post-surge fault was electronic, once contamination was addressed | Speaks the vendor-specific commands that sit outside the standard ATA set |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Imaged the drive with settings chosen for a surface that had been exposed | The imaging half of the PC-3000 platform, driven by the firmware half |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Rebuilt the volume and verified the recovered data | Stronger than most on the awkward filesystems — APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS, Btrfs |
On the bench.
Deal with the exposure before the original fault
The drive arrived sealed in the bag we'd asked for. Contamination handling came first — inspecting the platter surfaces and head sliders for particulate and for the scoring that a contaminated head can cause once it's spinning again. Getting that order wrong turns dust into permanent damage in seconds.
Find the real fault, which wasn't where he thought
With the platters cleared, the clicking traced to the board rather than the mechanism: the power event had damaged the electronics, and the drive's inability to initialise properly had produced the noise he interpreted as stuck heads. His reasoning had been sound; the conclusion was simply one component out.
Restore the board, image without pushing
The board was repaired with the original ROM data carried across, and the drive imaged with conservative settings — an exposed surface earns caution even when it looks clean. The read completed without incident.
The outcome.
A full recovery that came closer to not being one than the owner will enjoy knowing. His files returned complete; his screwdriver has been reassigned to furniture.
Related on the index.
More from Electrical damage.
Recognise your own drive in this story?
Same rule as every case above: power it down, and let the diagnosis be free before any decision has to be.