Case record · Desktop externals · EDR-2025-2315
A Different Capacity Every Time It Was Asked.
The LaCie d2 6TB sitting next to a Taunton mixing desk stopped spinning up and began to beep, and from one minute to the next the status of this unit's disk kept changing: Disk Utility showed 1.8TB and wouldn't mount it
, then a blank entry with no capacity at all
, then (on a borrowed PC) RAW, 0 bytes
. Changing cables and trying a different dock did not help. There were four terabytes of session master files and final mix files sitting on the drive.
Sound familiar? Talk to us.
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In plain English.
That beep is an indication of a motor struggling against some form of resistance that will not let the platters rotate. In most cases this resistance comes from the heads themselves, which are normally designed to rest on a ramp at the outer edge but have come down onto the actual data surface instead. As would be expected, the shifting sizes follow logically from this. During start-up a drive identifies itself based upon information stored on its platters. If you prevent a drive from accessing this information, then all it has available to provide the computer is guesswork, a different guess each time. None of the guesses are correct enough for the computer to mount the disk, read data from it or complete initialisation.
The tools this job took.
See how your case runs →| System | The part it played | Why we rate it |
|---|---|---|
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Captured the whole copy during the one window of steady, healthy rotation | The PC-3000's imager, taking its orders from the firmware side |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Read back the true identity and the defect lists after the heads were freed | Talks to a drive through the maker's own commands, not just standard ATA |
| R-Studio Technician | Reassembled the HFS+ volume with its sessions filed as she kept them | Handles most filesystems; dependable RAID reassembly |
On the bench.
Believe the sound: this fault lived inside the case
Her swaps (cable, dock, a second computer) each had the same end result, which is to say the outside world was quietly eliminated from consideration. The current trace on the bench completed the diagnosis: a repetitive cycle of a motor straining to move against a mechanical resistance for a few seconds before shutting down due to the drive's own protection circuitry.
Get the heads off the surface, then don't stop
Once the drive was opened, the stack was eased off the surface and the sliders checked out for damage. Luckily no scoring was found on the platters. The drive was powered up again and it introduced itself properly, like normal: correctly identified as 6TB, the correct model number, the correct firmware version. As soon as it had identified itself, the imager began to work.
One sitting for the hardware, everything else on the image
The read completed in full from start to finish with no power cycle along the way, since a drive that has landed its heads once owes you absolutely nothing on the next spin-up. Once the copy was complete and secure, the drive's portion of this task was done. Then the volume repair and the cleanup of the session folders took place based solely upon the image.
How it ended.
Four terabytes of master recordings were transferred to new media with all the names, dates and structure preserved. And stopping at the first beep had been beneficial for her, as there were no marks on the platters, and the mixes played exactly as they had in the studio.
More like this in the casebook.
Elsewhere in Desktop externals.
Sound like your drive?
Each example here shows the same thing: shut the device down, get your free diagnostic, then decide.