Case file · Portable drives · BDR-2025-0635
The Read/Write Head Is Bent.
The owner arrived with the diagnosis already done: he dropped his external while it was plugged in, and the verdict was already in his message: the read/write head is bent
and will need replacing
. Complicating matters: a refurbished drive with history, already playing up
before the fall, and no backup anywhere.
Same symptoms on your desk?
01273 964902
The decode.
Exactly right on all counts, and worth saying so. A bent head cannot be straightened into anything trustworthy — the flying geometry is set at manufacture to tolerances no bench can restore. It gets replaced with a matched donor assembly, full stop. What remains genuinely open on any drop is the platters: a bent head that made contact while spinning leaves scoring that no donor stack can read through, and no honest lab promises otherwise before looking.
Equipment on this case.
How a case runs →| Platform | What it did here | Why this tool |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Head map after the donor swap, revealing which surfaces had survived | Head-map-aware imaging with per-head timeout, reset and power-cycle control |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Staged imaging with the damaged zones deferred to the final passes | The imaging half of the PC-3000 platform, driven by the firmware half |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Read the drive's defect history — informative on a refurbished unit with a past | Speaks the vendor-specific commands that sit outside the standard ATA set |
On the bench.
Assess the platters before promising anything
The head stack was as described. The important inspection was the surfaces underneath: contact marks were present in a defined band, consistent with the drop, but the scoring was not the deep circular damage that ends a recovery. The refurbished drive's earlier 'playing up' also showed as pre-existing weak areas unrelated to the fall.
Matched donor stack, then map honestly
A donor head assembly from the correct family and generation was fitted and a head map built before any bulk reading. Two distinct problem zones emerged: the impact band, and the drive's own older weak regions — separate faults with separate causes, both needing to be worked around.
Image around both problems, weakest last
The healthy surfaces were imaged first and completely. The impact band and the pre-existing weak areas were then worked at low speed with controlled resets, recovering a substantial share of both without pushing a mechanism that had already been dropped once.
The outcome.
The strong majority of the drive recovered — everything the platters still held, honestly reported against what they didn't, with a written map of the affected regions. For an unbacked-up refurbished drive dropped mid-use, a better ending than the odds suggested.
Related on the index.
More from Portable drives.
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.