A LaCie Porsche Design drive started clicking and dropped out after a knock on a desk, taking a designer's working portfolio with it. Clicking is the sound of failing heads — a physical fault that only gets worse with power. We replaced the heads in clean conditions and imaged the drive before they could degrade further.
The slim aluminium LaCie had been knocked while running, and afterwards it clicked steadily and would not appear on the computer. It held a freelance designer's portfolio and current client work, with no separate copy. That rhythmic click is a warning sign: it means the heads can no longer read the disk and are resetting on every attempt, and each of those attempts risks further damage — so the drive was switched off and brought straight in rather than being retried.
Inside the drive, microscopic read-write heads fly a fraction of a hair's breadth above spinning platters. A knock can make a head touch the surface — a head crash — leaving it damaged and unable to find its position, at which point it retreats and retries, producing the click. Every extra spin-up drags the compromised heads across the platters again, so the single most useful thing to do is stop powering the drive: repeated attempts to “get it working” are what turn a recoverable head crash into permanent platter damage.
The drive was opened in controlled clean-air conditions and the head assembly inspected; the crashed heads were replaced with a matched set from a donor drive of the same family, restoring the drive's ability to read. Because a repaired drive is fragile, it was imaged carefully — the strongest areas first, then patient, retimed passes over the weaker zones — to capture as much as possible before any further degradation. All recovery then continued from that image rather than the drive.
With a good image in hand, the enclosure's USB bridge was accounted for and the file system parsed from the raw data. The portfolio's folder structure and file names were reconstructed intact, and the design files — layered documents, images and exports — were pulled out and checked. Where a handful of sectors on a worst-affected area couldn't be read, the affected files were identified precisely so the designer knew exactly what was and wasn't complete.
Files were opened across the recovered set to confirm they were usable, then returned on a fresh drive. About 97% of the work came back, including the client projects that mattered most. We noted the reality of portable drives: they're built to be carried, which makes knocks inevitable, so anything important on one deserves a second copy that isn't going anywhere.
Clean-air head-stack replacement with matched donor parts · adaptive imaging for a fragile drive · file-system reconstruction. Physical work and imaging carried out in-house in Belfast.
Send it to us for a free, no-obligation diagnostic. We’ll tell you what can be recovered and put a fixed price in writing before any work starts — and on most jobs, if we can’t get your data back, there’s nothing to pay. Post your device in, or drop it to us by appointment.
Switch it off and leave it off. Clicking almost always means a physical head fault, and every minute powered on risks further damage. Don't retry it or run software — send it in for a clean-conditions assessment.
Frequently, yes. A knock often damages the heads while leaving the platters — and your data — intact. Replacing the heads and imaging carefully recovers the great majority of such drives, provided they aren't run into the ground first.
Single-drive physical recoveries start from £300 plus VAT, with a fixed written quote after a free diagnostic. Physical work carries a deposit toward donor parts and bench time, with the balance due only on success.