Case Study
Opened at home first. Recovered in the lab anyway.
A Seagate 250GB Momentus Thin laptop drive, clicking and beeping, had already been opened outside a cleanroom before it reached us — bending a read head and coating the media in dust. Here is how the data came back in full.
The case
A laptop drive, a custom database, and a DIY attempt first.
The drive: a Seagate 250GB Momentus Thin, a 2.5" mechanism also sold in laptops as the 320GB Momentus Thin.
The client was a large communications company in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The drive had stopped being recognised by the laptop and was clicking and beeping — classic signs of a head or platter fault. It held a custom SQL database spread across two NTFS partitions, and a full recovery was needed.
Before it reached us, the drive had already been opened outside a cleanroom. Opening a hard drive without the right tools and a controlled clean environment is, in our experience, close to a guaranteed way to turn a recoverable fault into a lost one — and this case was no exception.
Once on the bench, inspection showed why. The top slider from the reading head had come off entirely and was bent 180 degrees backwards. Left running in that state, it would have scraped across the platter surface like a grinder. On top of that, the media was coated in dust introduced while the drive sat open — a contaminated surface on top of a wrecked head stack.
The recovery
Donor heads, a clean surface, then a careful image.
- 01
Head stack assessment
The damaged head stack was inspected under magnification: the top slider snapped off and bent backwards, with the platter surface contaminated by dust from the earlier DIY attempt.
- 02
Donor head transplant
A matching donor head stack was sourced and transplanted, and the platter surface cleaned — work that requires specialist tools and a controlled environment, done under cleanroom conditions.
- 03
Power-up test
With the new heads fitted, the drive was powered up to check it could read its firmware from the media and reach a ready state. It span up cleanly with no clicking — an early sign the transplant had worked.
- 04
Imaging on DDI4
A DeepSpar DDI4 imager was chosen over our PC-3000 for this drive. It read the MFT to build a file list, then imaged the drive sector by sector, slowing only where existing media damage caused bad sectors — a process that ran across two to three days.
The result
100% recovered, both partitions intact.
The recovery was fully successful. Both NTFS partitions were rebuilt and the client's custom SQL database recovered complete.
The margin here was small. A snapped, bent head left running would have scored the platter surface further with every second of power; the dust contamination alone was enough to compromise a DIY attempt at imaging. Once physically damaged and opened outside a cleanroom, a drive like this needs a donor head transplant and a controlled surface before any imaging can safely begin.
If a drive in your business has already been opened, powered on repeatedly, or worked on before reaching a lab, say so when you get in touch — it changes what we check first. For drives with a suspected head or platter fault generally, see our approach to hard drive data recovery.
Stop there. Power it down, don't attempt anything further, and tell us what happened — an engineer will give you an honest view of what's still recoverable and a fixed quote before any work starts.