Case Study
Knocked off the desk. Sage data recovered anyway.
A 320GB Western Digital drive running a client's Sage 50 accounts was knocked over by accident — leaving both read heads damaged and the business data on it inaccessible. Here is how it came back, in full.
The case
A knock, a dead head, a business running on Sage.
The drive: a Western Digital WD3200AAJS, 320GB, running custom business applications and Sage 50 accounts.
The PC housing it was knocked over by accident. It came to us needing professional recovery, not a repair-shop guess.
Diagnosis on PC-3000 showed the drive still identified correctly, with full access to its service area — but read testing told the real story. Head 0 was reading at around 1MB/s and falling. Head 1 was returning under 1KB/s: functionally dead, with the other head not far behind it.
This is a physical fault, not a software one. Generic imaging tools — a Linux boot disc, a £50 recovery utility — cannot repair a damaged head or work around it; they can only keep hammering the drive with read attempts until the surviving head fails too. On a drive in this state, that is the difference between a recoverable job and a lost one.
The recovery
Diagnose, image selectively, replace, complete.
- 01
PC-3000 diagnosis
The drive identified fine and gave full access to its service area. A known WD firmware slow-response issue was corrected safely, then a head map confirmed the real damage: head 0 weak, head 1 effectively unreadable.
- 02
Priority imaging on DDI4
Loaded into a DeepSpar DDI4 imager, which confirmed the same picture. With head 1 barely responding, we imaged using head 0 first to secure the highest-priority data — around 60% of the 4GB Sage database folder, in roughly six hours against heavy bad sectors.
- 03
Head replacement in the cleanroom
A matching donor was pulled from our stock and the heads swapped under a class 10 laminar flow cleanroom cabinet. The drive identified immediately on the first swap, and the platter surface showed no further damage under the microscope.
- 04
Completing the image
With head 1 now reading fair, DDI4 imaged the remainder of the drive, including the full Sage database folder targeted for this recovery.
The result
Sage data recovered in full.
Every byte of the client's Sage data was recovered — 100%. Total cost was around £350 including VAT, with a three-day turnaround from drop-off to verified return.
We rated this a 6 out of 10 difficulty job: two damaged heads, a partial priority image, and a physical head swap before the recovery could complete. Attempted with home software and a DIY setup, the outcome would have been closer to a 1 out of 10 — and very possibly a total loss.
Business data like this rarely gets a second chance. For anything similar, see how we approach hard drive data recovery generally, or get a straight assessment of your own drive.
Power it down and stop using it. Tell us what happened and an engineer will give you an honest view of what's recoverable and a fixed quote before any work starts.