An IBM Deskstar clicking steadily on power-up and invisible to the BIOS. The nickname is melodramatic and the mechanism behind it is not — the heads cannot find their bearings, and every attempt to try again is another pass across the surface holding your work.
A university student's drive began clicking loudly on power-up and stopped being detected by Windows or the BIOS. Connecting it externally froze the machine it was attached to. On it were research papers, datasets, fieldwork notes and the thesis work behind three years of study.
They had powered it up a handful of times before calling — enough to be worth mentioning, and few enough to matter in their favour.
The IBM Deskstar name carries some history. The 75GXP generation earned a reputation for failure serious enough to be part of why IBM sold its drive division to Hitachi in 2003, and drives from that family still surface with head and surface problems two decades on.
Opened under filtered clean air, this one had a straightforward head failure. The clicking was the assembly retracting to its stop and recalibrating, over and over, because it could not locate the servo data that tells it where it is. Crucially, the platters showed no visible scoring — the heads had failed to read rather than dug in, which set the ceiling for this job much higher than it might have been. The firmware was intact, so once the mechanism worked the drive would present itself normally.
A donor Deskstar of matching family, capacity and head configuration was sourced — drives sharing a model number can differ in head count and internal revision by build date, so the match has to be exact rather than approximate. The damaged assembly was replaced and the internal filter changed.
The repaired drive was then imaged read-only immediately, in short controlled passes, prioritising the directories holding the thesis and datasets first. A drive fitted with donor heads is a recovery vehicle rather than a working disk, and it should be read once rather than tested.
Documents were opened rather than counted, and datasets checked for structural completeness — a spreadsheet that opens with rows missing from the middle is a worse outcome than one that fails outright, because nobody notices. Where file indexes had been damaged, the underlying files were carved back and matched to their original names where possible.
About 97% recovered, including the thesis, the datasets and the bulk of the research material. The researcher submitted on time.
What made that possible was the absence of platter scoring, and that in turn came down to how few times the drive had been run after the clicking started. A drive powered up half a dozen times is a very different proposition from one restarted every morning for a fortnight in the hope it settles.
Clicking means the heads cannot find their servo data, so the assembly retracts and recalibrates repeatedly. The harm comes from what happens alongside it: if the heads are compromised, each rotation is another pass across the recording surface. Power it off at the first click rather than the fiftieth — whether the platters get scored is largely decided by that. Single drives from £300 +VAT, 50% deposit for clean-air work.
Send us your device for a free diagnostic, and tell us a little about what happened — an engineer will review it and confirm your exact quote in writing before any work begins.
Getting your data back begins with getting the device to us. Pack it up safely, pop your contact details inside, and send it over — once we’ve run the free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work starts.
Posting it? A tracked, insured service is what we’d recommend. Rather drop it in? You’re welcome Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm — just package the device up as above first.
Want a bit more detail first? Fill in the form with more about your issue and an engineer will review it and send you a custom quote.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 01865 593000.
The sound of the head assembly retracting to its stop and recalibrating, over and over, because it cannot locate the servo data that tells it where it is on the platter. It means the heads are failing — and if they are physically compromised, each attempt costs surface.
Frequently, and the outcome depends heavily on platter condition. Where the heads have failed to read but not dug in, a matched donor assembly is fitted under clean air and the drive imaged — often with very little loss. Where the surface is scored, that portion is gone.
As few as possible. There is no safe number, but the practical difference between a drive run half a dozen times and one restarted daily for a fortnight is usually the difference between a near-complete recovery and a partial one.
Yes, and they still turn up. The 75GXP generation had a genuinely poor reliability record — part of the background to IBM selling its drive division to Hitachi — but donor parts remain findable and the recovery itself is well understood.
From £300 plus VAT for a single drive, quoted in writing after a free 48-hour diagnostic. Clean-air and donor-part work carries a 50% deposit, with the balance payable only on success.
Start with an instant online quote, or call and talk it through with us first. You'll have a clear, fixed price before any work begins.