Not a thing wrong with the hardware — a corrupted partition table had made a full drive look empty. Rebuilt from an image and recovered.
One morning a customer’s PC came up with a message that the drive needed formatting, and a disk that had been full the night before now read as empty, unallocated space. It looks like catastrophe, but a drive that abruptly appears blank usually has nothing physically wrong with it, and this one was a case in point — mechanically spotless, with an entirely logical fault. What had broken was the partition table: the compact index that records where each partition sits on the disk. Corrupt that, and every file stays exactly where it was while becoming invisible to Windows.
Reading the drive on our equipment showed it to be in fine mechanical order, which pinned the fault as logical rather than physical. Lose a partition table and you generally lose only the directions to the data, not the data itself — a much brighter outlook than the formatting prompt suggests, as long as the disk is left well alone and nothing fresh is written over the top.
Perfectly healthy or not, the original disk is never worked on. A full image went onto the PC3000 and every step happened on that copy: combing it for the real beginning of the file system, reconstructing the partition layout, and repairing the file-system records until the data could be addressed in place again. Nothing had genuinely been overwritten — the customer had had the good sense to stop using the PC the moment the message appeared — so the recovery was complete.
Once the partition was back the volume mounted precisely as before. We made sure the documents, photos and everything else opened properly, then committed it all to fresh media.
Inside three working days the drive’s whole contents were restored. It’s advice we give constantly: a drive that suddenly demands formatting or turns up empty has very often kept your files intact — so don’t format it, stop using it, and remember that it’s the continued writing to the disk, more than the fault itself, that risks losing anything.
PC3000 — imaged, then the partition and file-system records rebuilt on the copy. The original drive is only ever read, never written to.
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 01483 901310.
Usually not. That’s often a corrupt partition table rather than a hardware fault: the files are intact, only the map to them is damaged. We image the drive and rebuild the partition and file-system records on the copy so it reads normally again. Don’t format it in the meantime.
From £300 plus VAT, most jobs no fix, no fee, with a fixed quote before any work starts.
No — that’s the one thing that can truly lose them. While the partition is corrupt the data is still there, but continuing to use the drive risks overwriting it. Switch the machine off and let the drive be imaged.
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.