Board-level faults · surge · CDF-2025-0614
I Unscrewed the Lid Looking for Seized Heads.
By the time the drive reached us he had already owned up to the worst part himself. A storm sat over Roath one evening and cut the power to his street twice within ten minutes; afterwards the WD Blue in his desktop just sat there ticking about once a second, nothing else at all
. Somewhere online he had read that a seized head stack sounds like that, so by ten it was open on the kitchen worktop
. Everything inside looked normal to him, which narrowed it in his mind to either the board or the motor
. What concerned us was not the fault. It was the open lid.
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Why that happens.
People open a drive because it still works afterwards, and that is the trap in it. A modern disk is a sealed unit, and the steel cover is part of that seal rather than a hatch over it. Inside, the heads ride a few nanometres clear of platters spinning at speed, a gap far smaller than anything drifting about a kitchen. Take the screws out and nothing dramatic happens that evening. The cost turns up later. Whatever the electricity broke is still broken, and now a film of house dust lies over the surfaces your photographs are written on.
What we used on this one.
Every step, in order →| The tools | What it did here | Why it helps |
|---|---|---|
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Put the failure on the electronics, not the mechanics, and identified the dead chip | Opens the maker's service commands, which a plain ATA link will not pass |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Read the disk slowly, on the assumption those platters had breathed room air | Imaging driven from inside the drive's own firmware, by the PC-3000 |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Rebuilt the file system and opened the photographs | Reads the volume formats that defeat most software: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS, Btrfs |
How it went.
Clean the platters first, spin them later
To his credit he then left it alone: nothing powered up, the screws put back, the drive bagged up. Under the microscope the top platter had picked up a decent load — grit, and fibres off a tea towel or a jumper, none of which a breather filter would ever pass. All of it came away before the spindle was given power. Spin a dirty platter and every speck turns into a cutter under the head.
Now measure what the surge destroyed
Only clean surfaces give honest readings. Heads, motor and platters all tested sound, which pointed the fault at the electronics, and at one part in particular: the motor driver chip, taken out by the surge. A drive that cannot reach speed keeps retrying, roughly once a second, and from outside a metal case that retry is hard to tell from a head problem. He was not wrong to worry. He was listening to a drive misdescribing itself.
Swap the board, read it slowly
A donor board of the same revision went on, carrying the ROM lifted off the burnt original — without that chip a replacement has no idea which drive it is bolted to. Imaging then ran at reduced speed with retries capped, since kitchen air had already been over those surfaces and there is no undoing that. It read end to end even so.
Signing it off.
All the scans came back: three winters of pictures of Roath and the people in it. He came far closer to losing them than we said at the time. There are two copies now, and the Torx bits are back in the drawer.
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More from the power cases.
Is that what yours is doing?
Power it down, get it to us, and hold off on any decision until the diagnosis says what can still be read.