A flood, a spill or a fire needn’t mean your data is lost — provided you move quickly. Our engineers strip off the corrosion and soot, swap the ruined parts from a 10,000-strong donor stock, and read your data back in-house.
$ bdr diagnose /dev/sda → Device: WD Elements (4 TB, USB) → Status: WATER DAMAGE — corrosion on board & contacts → Client: confidential · Camberley GU2 8XH $ bdr engineer-working → Decontamination: platters & internals cleaned → Donor board matched: from stock · 0 days wait → Imaging: 3.52 TB / 4.00 TB (88%) $ bdr verify → ✓ family_photos — 88,140 files → ✓ documents — 9,620 files → ✓ everything recoverable — saved
Send power through a wet drive and it can short on the spot; reach for heat or a bag of rice and corrosion and mineral salts bake onto the platters — the damage worsening by the hour. Change nothing about the drive, keep it sealed, and get it to us as fast as you can.
Liquid and heat go at a drive differently — shorts and corrosion at one end, soot and warping at the other. Below are the faults we see, and fix, most.
Water- and fire-damaged drives from every major brand have crossed our bench since 2002. If the data lives on spinning platters, we can almost certainly help.
Internal and external alike; 2.5-inch laptop and 3.5-inch desktop; SATA, SAS, SCSI and IDE/PATA; everything from 40 GB legacy units to today’s 24 TB helium drives.
A flood, spill or fire drive is cleaned before it’s ever read. We decontaminate it, repair the damage, and only then read your data back — patiently, and in a set order.
Post the drive in or bring it by; we gauge the water or fire damage across board, heads and platters and send a written quote, usually within 48 hours.
In a clean, particle-controlled environment the drive is opened and its soot, residue, corrosion and mineral deposits carefully lifted off the internals and platter surface with the proper solvents — giving the heads a clean surface to read.
Head-stack assemblies, boards or motors are drawn from our donor stock, matched to the precise model, firmware revision and head map, to stand in for whatever the water or fire destroyed.
If the board can’t be saved, its original ROM and unique adaptive parameters are moved onto a matched donor PCB, so the drive powers up and addresses its own heads correctly.
With it running, we clone the drive sector by sector onto stable storage using imaging hardware, re-reading weak spots and stepping patiently around damaged heads and zones to pull the most data before it tires.
From that image your files are rebuilt, checked off against a file listing, and returned to you on fresh media.
Your data goes back on an external drive we ship to you, or via our free download service for up to 75GB.
With heads, boards and motors matched on-site, most water- and fire-damaged drives move to repair as soon as they’re clean — there’s no waiting weeks for a donor to arrive.
Tell us about your drive and we will get back to you, usually within 30 minutes during the day.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 01483 901310.
No hidden fees, no pressure — just a free diagnostic and a written quote before a thing is done.
A snapshot of recent water and fire damaged recoveries, handled in-house. Names withheld, results verified.
The board and contacts were heavily corroded. We decontaminated the internals, fitted a matched donor board, and got a clean image on the first attempt.
The spill had shorted the board. We cleaned off the residue, replaced the board and carried the firmware over, and the full volume came back.
Smoke and soot contamination, plus water from the firefighting. We decontaminated the platters, fitted fresh heads, and recovered most of the data.
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.
What people ask us most about water, flood and fire damaged drives.
Don’t switch it on, and don’t reach for heat or rice to dry it. Powering a wet drive shorts the board and forces corrosion deep inside; heat warps the platters. Seal it in a bag to hold the moisture rather than letting salts crust onto the platters, and get it to us for cleaning and recovery in a controlled environment.
Most of the time, yes — especially if it reaches us soon. We open it in a particle-controlled environment, clean corrosion and mineral deposits off board and platters, fit matched heads or a donor PCB bearing the original ROM as needed, and image it sector by sector. The faster it arrives, the less corrosion has taken hold.
Often it can. We clear soot and smoke residue from the internals and platter surface, swap out heat-damaged parts, and recover whatever the magnetic surface still carries. Fire drives nearly always come with water damage from firefighting too, and we take on both together.
It doesn’t — that’s a myth where hard drives are concerned. Rice can neither reach the sealed internals nor reverse corrosion already forming on platters and board, and leaving the drive to ‘dry’ simply lets the damage set. Keep it sealed and damp and send it for proper decontamination.
A great deal. Corrosion and mineral deposits deepen the longer a wet drive sits, etching into contacts and platter surface and making a clean recovery harder. Don’t power it and don’t dry it — seal it and get it straight to us so we can decontaminate before the damage spreads.
A single water- or fire-damaged hard drive is £300 + VAT as standard. The written diagnostic beforehand is free, and most jobs are no fix, no fee. Where contamination is heavy or heat damage severe, a higher critical-recovery quote may apply — always confirmed in writing first.
Once you’ve approved the quote, most water and fire recoveries finish within three to four working days, though badly contaminated drives can take longer. The initial diagnostic is generally done within 48 hours.
Every major manufacturer — the likes of Seagate, Western Digital, HGST, Toshiba, Hitachi, Samsung, Maxtor, Fujitsu, IBM, Quantum, SanDisk, LaCie, Buffalo, G-Technology, Transcend, ADATA, Verbatim, Silicon Power, Intenso, Iomega, ModusTech and UnionSine — in 3.5-inch desktop, 2.5-inch laptop and external form factors.
Either hand it in at our Guildford unit on a weekday, 9am to 5:30pm, or send it fully insured. Package and seal it, and enclose your full contact details — name, address, phone and email — so it can be booked in. Once it’s here the free diagnostic runs and a written quote follows before any work.
A free written diagnostic, no fix no fee on most jobs, and a 10,000-part inventory standing behind every repair. The sooner it reaches us, the better — begin your recovery today.