The laptop was a write-off. The drive’s circuit board had burnt clean through. But the platters — the place the data actually sits — had come through almost unscathed.
← All case files · £300 + VAT, flat
What reached us was a laptop the fire had killed outright — no power, no display, and so no way in to the disk bolted inside it. That disk was the entire memory of a clothing business: its bookkeeping, its stock counts, who it bought from, and the details of everyone it sold to. Nowhere was any of it duplicated.
A drive that has been in a fire tends to turn up looking beyond hope: the label blackened, the plastic run and set, the shell buckled, everything under a film of soot. Appearances mislead here more than almost anywhere. The part that carries the data is a stack of rigid metal or glass discs shut inside a metal casing, and the heat needed to ruin a drive’s exterior falls well short of the far higher temperature that would actually erase the magnetic coating — which is why these come back much more readily than the outside suggests.
burnt right through, so not a volt had reached the mechanism — and that is the very thing that spared the discs. A platter stack that never spins can do itself no harm.
cooked in place by the heat, with no prospect of flying over a platter again.
a little heat and a little dirt, but a recording surface that still gave a clean read.
A ruined board, ruined heads and untouched discs is, oddly, the outcome you hope for after a fire — and nine times out of ten it’s the one you get.
Since none of the fire-killed parts held any data, the fix was to change them. A matching donor PCB went on in place of the burnt one, and inside the clean-air environment a matching donor head set replaced the welded originals. With the drive spinning and reading once more we took a gentle image — sound discs give up their contents without a struggle — and confined all further work to that copy. The disk itself was never written to.
Once imaged, the disk gave everything up — the accounts and invoices, the tax paperwork, the stock lists, the supplier details and the full customer database.
As a rule these jobs go far better than the wreckage implies, for the reason already given: the discs are what pull through. The thing that actually caps a fire recovery is seldom the blaze. It’s the following weeks — whether anyone put a current through a drive whose board was wrecked, and whether the unit was left to sit and “dry” while acidic soot and the water from the hoses ate slowly into its contacts.
After a fire — or a flood — the natural move is to dry the drive off and see if it still works. Both parts of that are mistakes, and together they account for more dead fire drives than the flames ever do.
Leave it switched off. Where the board is damaged, feeding it power only carries the harm deeper into the drive.
Don’t attempt to dry or clean it, either. Hose water evaporates and deposits everything that was dissolved in it, and the soot it leaves is acidic; a drive that’s spent weeks ‘drying’ on a shelf is generally in a far sorrier state than one that lands here still wet and grimy.
Seal it in a bag as-is, post it, and let us know exactly what it’s survived.
Drop the drive at our Guildford Business Park reception, or post it to us — it costs nothing to find out what happened. You get a written figure from the fixed bands before any work begins.