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 Hitachi Touro Mobile that spun up normally and made a steady whirring noise while showing nothing at all.
A Maxtor that crashed and afterwards showed no files at all. Disk Management offered to initialise it as MBR or GPT.
A laptop pulled from an upstairs bedroom after a house fire, scorched and then thoroughly soaked by what put it out. The platters were the least damaged part of it.
Windows saw a device reporting 32 MB, a garbled model string, and a prompt to format it.
A business external that had become painfully slow, freezing whole machines when anyone opened anything from it.
Random crashes to a black screen, and four reasonable troubleshooting steps taken in a sensible order.
A My Cloud used as the safety net for a business. Everything was copied onto it, the source was reformatted, and only afterwards did anyone try to read the files back.
The commonest way a USB stick dies and the one with the best odds — because the connector is the only part designed to be gripped, so it gives way first, and everything holding your data sits beyond the failure.
A school’s external NVMe crashing after long transfers for weeks, then vanishing entirely. The flash was sound.
A 1TB SD card holding photographs, video and documents. It appeared at the right capacity and folders opened — and most of what was inside was missing or unreadable.
A Cruzer that worked for five years, sat unused for a long stretch, then failed the moment it was needed.
A pocket SSD that stopped being recognised anywhere.
An accounting firm shut out of an external they could see perfectly well.
An external throwing read errors on some files while others behaved normally, with A-Level coursework on it and a deadline coming.
A LaCie external RAID unit, working normally, with every disk pulled and replaced at once — on the reasonable assumption the box would notice and rebuild itself.
A My Passport that stopped being detected, opened up on the entirely reasonable assumption that a bare drive reads on any machine.
An old IBM drive out of a parallel-port enclosure, holding code its owner had written as a child.
An Asus laptop that stopped booting, with the SSD appearing in the BIOS as a one-megabyte device.
A laptop encrypted end to end with VeraCrypt, part-way through being decrypted when it stopped.
A completely dead laptop, and a drive inside it in perfect health.
A business owner ran a factory reset on a Sony VAIO by accident, with financial records, client files and operational documents on it and no backup anywhere.
A dog knocked a MacBook off its owner’s lap onto carpet. It carried on working, so she carried on using it.
An iMac Fusion Drive that stopped mounting.
A liquid-damaged MacBook Pro with its storage soldered to a board that no longer powers up.
Twenty years of parish records on a drive nothing in the building could connect to.
Files vanished from an SSD, and the drive began quietly destroying them without being asked.
A Buffalo MiniStation that spun up, produced a sequence of noises no drive should make, and was invisible to every machine it touched.
Under a minute of mains failure, and one desktop came back reporting an impossible capacity and refusing every read.
Nothing wrong with the hardware at all.
A photographer’s Drobo showing two amber bays at once.
A Netgear ReadyNAS reporting bad sectors across several members and running badly. The client added a disk expecting the unit to rebuild and stabilise itself.
A Synology reporting one failed disk and grinding audibly from a second bay, with a routine data scrub queued for the Sunday. Scrubbing is genuinely good practice.
A Manchester business rang the morning after an employee left. The shared folders were empty and the array was in perfect health — six disks, no degradation, no errors.
A 24-drive SuperServer holding databases, virtual machines and the operational core of a business.
A mains failure took the building down.
Three disks, one dead, and nobody left in the business who knew how the array had been set up.
A D-Link NAS reported a failed drive. The client fitted a replacement and started a rebuild, and the unit estimated four months.
A six-disk RAID 5 went offline after a power cut, with one member failed and only two of the remaining five recognised.
An HP ProLiant refusing to boot, reporting a logical drive error and placing the array into interim recovery mode — alongside a cache battery fault the client had been ignoring for months as a separate nuisance.
Locked out of a laptop, no recovery key anywhere, and a deadline.
Every document renamed, a ransom note in each folder, and the backup NAS encrypted alongside everything else because it was mapped as a drive letter.
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