In-depth write-ups of real recoveries and investigations — the diagnosis, the tools and exactly how each job was brought back. Most drives are imaged on our PC3000 and DeepSpar systems before any recovery begins. For shorter summaries, see our case studies.
A Deskstar left in a drawer for years came back with its heads stuck to the platters — eased free in the clean area, then imaged before the fragile drive could fail again.
A fifteen-year-old DiamondMax with worn heads and bad sectors throughout, imaged slowly over multiple passes to salvage a lifetime of documents and photos.
The laptop was destroyed and the board on the drive burnt through — but the platters, where the data actually lives, had barely been touched.
A SpinPoint that span up but reported a garbage identity — its corrupt service-area modules rebuilt on the PC3000 from the drive’s own backups, then imaged clean.
A 2 TB Barracuda that clicked, then vanished — a crashed head replaced with donor parts and the drive imaged surface by surface to bring the photos back.
A Toshiba 2.5-inch drive that span perfectly but reported a garbage identity — its corrupt service area rebuilt on the PC3000, then imaged cleanly.
A WD Blue left dead-silent by a mains surge — the burnt board repaired and its unique adaptive ROM moved across, then a clean image of the project archive.
A Kingston USB stick snapped off while plugged in — connector sheared and board cracked, but the NAND chip survived, so the coursework was read back off the flash.
Seven years of CAD work at an architecture firm, held on one M.2 stick that had run too hot for months — then it gave off a burning smell and vanished from the BIOS.
A SanDisk SD card quick-formatted by mistake, losing twenty years of teaching files — recovered by carving the data from the raw card, because a quick format erases only the index.
A Kingston USB stick that powered up but demanded formatting — its NAND chip lifted and read directly, then the raw dump unscrambled into a clean image.
A Samsung T7 portable SSD pulled mid-write that then went unrecognised — the controller brought back in technical mode and its translator rebuilt to reach the flash.
A dropped Iomega external that would only buzz — the spindle seized and the heads knocked down, both put right in the clean area before imaging on the DeepSpar.
A LaCie d2 that disappeared from every machine — the disk was flawless but the encrypting bridge board had died; we worked out its scheme and decoded the bare drive.
A WD My Book Duo RAID 1 mirror with one dead disk — the healthy survivor held a full copy, but the enclosure metadata and hardware encryption meant nothing would mount it standalone.
A WD My Passport showing as RAW on a Mac — the file system corrupt, but every standard fix failing because the drive is hardware-encrypted and the key lives in the bridge, not on the disk.
An Acer Aspire laptop drive with a failed head and a dissertation on it — donor heads fitted in the clean area, then a staged head-by-head image on the DeepSpar.
An Asus ZenBook NVMe that dropped out of the BIOS overnight — a controller lock-up cleared in the SSD’s technical mode and the corrupt translator rebuilt.
A dropped Fujitsu Lifebook drive that clicked then fell off the system — imaged in careful passes on the DeepSpar to recover a set of client case files.
A Guildford laptop that would not power on at all — the fault was the motherboard, the drive was healthy, and it was removed and imaged on our own equipment.
A Sony VAIO laptop drive that took a fall, seizing the spindle and damaging the heads — both faults put right in the clean area, then imaged on the DeepSpar.
Stuck at the Apple logo and looping, Recovery Mode crashing, Disk Utility unable to repair it — a failed macOS update is rarely a dead drive, but a corrupted file system on one already starting to fail.
An iMac Fusion Drive that broke when its hard-disk half failed — the failing disk imaged, the healthy SSD copied, and the Core Storage volume rebuilt from both.
A dead-board MacBook with soldered, encrypted flash: why board-level recovery of a soldered Mac is impossible for anyone, and what to do instead.
A decades-old Compaq IDE drive with worn heads and a family photo archive on it — imaged gently over repeated passes on the DeepSpar to get it all off.
A Dell desktop system drive with a crashed head, throwing errors and blue screens — donor heads fitted, then a staged image on the DeepSpar saved the office’s working files.
A Gateway desktop drive whose spindle motor had seized solid — the platter stack transplanted into a matched donor and imaged on the DeepSpar.
A Lenovo desktop SATA SSD that vanished from the BIOS after the mains dropped — the controller coaxed out of its fault state and the mapping tables repaired.
A Windows PC whose drive suddenly showed as empty and asked to be formatted — a corrupt partition table rebuilt from an image, with no hardware fault at all.
A Netgear ReadyNAS whose X-RAID volume stayed offline after a disk failure and a failed resync — the members imaged and the btrfs volume rebuilt away from the box.
A six-bay QNAP running RAID 0 lost a single disk and the whole volume went with it — because a stripe keeps no parity, no mirror and nothing at all to fall back on.
A Synology SHR volume that crashed when the power failed during a rebuild — the members imaged and the SHR/btrfs volume reassembled off the hardware.
During routine maintenance a twelve-disk Synology RAID 10 was initialised, overwriting the metadata so DSM saw nothing — but the data region survived, which is exactly why it came back.
A RAID 6 server at a manufacturing firm dropped offline when a third disk failed — every drive imaged and the array rebuilt from the copies on an emergency, round-the-clock basis.
An eight-drive HP ProLiant RAID 5 that had quietly lost its redundancy long before it fell over — one degraded disk is what the array survives, a second is what finishes it.
A two-disk RAID 0 with no redundancy taken down by a single head-failed drive — the failed member recovered in the clean area, then the stripe reassembled from both images.
A two-disk RAID 1 where both mirror members had grown bad sectors — the good sectors from each combined into one complete image of the volume.
A four-disk RAID 5 that fell offline when a second disk dropped mid-rebuild — every member imaged behind a write-blocker and the array rebuilt virtually from the copies.
A four-disk RAID 5 that vanished from the operating system entirely — the disks and the array were fine, but the controller firmware had corrupted, and letting it fix itself would have been fatal.
A locked Dell laptop with no recovery key — the Volume Master Key lifted from its hibernation file with Passware to decrypt the drive.
Every file encrypted, the boot record rewritten, the shadow copies wiped, a ransom note left behind — the case file where we set out what actually gets recovered, because what most firms claim to do here simply cannot be done.
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.