These are the only jobs here where a week’s delay changes the answer. Corrosion does not stop when the drive dries — it keeps attacking the board for as long as the residue is in contact, and a month in a carrier bag routinely does more damage than the flood or the fire did.
$ mdr diagnose /dev/sda → Device: WD Elements (4 TB, USB) → Status: WATER DAMAGE — corrosion on board & contacts → Client: confidential · Chester CH1 $ mdr engineer-working → Decontamination: platters & internals cleaned → Donor board matched: from stock · 0 days wait → Imaging: 3.52 TB / 4.00 TB (88%) $ mdr verify → ✓ family_photos — 88,140 files → ✓ documents — 9,620 files → ✓ everything recoverable — saved
Drying concentrates the mineral and salt residue that causes corrosion rather than removing it. A drive sealed damp and sent immediately is in far better condition than one air-dried on a windowsill for a fortnight.
Which makes these the only jobs on this site where a week’s delay materially changes the outcome.
Flood water carries dissolved minerals; fire leaves acidic smoke residue; the water used to put a fire out combines both. None of that stops working when the drive dries. It keeps attacking the board traces, the component legs and the connectors for as long as it remains in contact, and a month in a carrier bag does more damage than the original event frequently did.
The sealed chamber holding the platters usually keeps liquid and particulate out, which is why the data itself is generally intact. What fails is everything outside it. So the objective is to get the contamination off before it eats through anything critical, and that is a race that starts the moment the drive gets wet.
A realistic picture of what each kind of exposure does.
The order is fixed and it is the opposite of what instinct suggests.
Applying current to a wet or contaminated board is how a recoverable drive becomes a short circuit. Assessment happens before any electricity.
Appropriate solvents to lift residue rather than simply drying it — drying leaves the corrosive material behind in a more concentrated form.
Component-level repair under magnification, and replacement of anything the contamination destroyed.
Where liquid or particulate reached the chamber, the platters are cleaned and the internal filter replaced before the drive is ever spun.
A decontaminated drive is not a restored drive. It may tolerate a single read, so it is imaged in one planned pass rather than tested.
The one variable that costs you nothing and changes everything.
Water and fire damaged drives are from £300 +VAT after a free 48-hour diagnostic, with a 50% deposit because clean-air and component-level work is committed before anyone knows what the platters look like.
What genuinely changes the outcome is how quickly it reaches us. Seal the drive in a plastic bag with a little of whatever it was in — keeping it wet is better than letting it dry — and send it the same day. Call first so we know it is coming and can handle it on arrival rather than the next morning.
Send the device over with a short account of what happened to it. The diagnostic costs nothing and commits you to nothing, and the figure that follows is fixed in writing before anything is opened.
Nothing can begin until the device is on the bench, which makes this the only step that needs anything from you. Pack it properly, put your details in with it, and send it over. What follows is a free diagnostic and a written figure, in that order.
Posting it? Use something tracked and insured — whatever is on the drive is worth considerably more than the postage. Bringing it in? Weekdays, 9am to 5:30pm, and it still wants packing as above for the journey.
Tell us what the device is, what it is doing, and anything already tried — an engineer will come back with a realistic view of the odds and a price band, before you commit to posting anything.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 0161 871 0788.
What people ask us most about water, flood and fire damaged drives.
No. Drying concentrates the minerals and salts that cause corrosion instead of removing them. Seal it damp in a bag and send it immediately — a wet drive that arrives today is in better condition than a dried one that arrives next week.
No. Rice absorbs some ambient moisture and does nothing about the dissolved residue that actually attacks the board. It also introduces starch dust. It is the single most commonly repeated piece of bad advice about wet electronics.
Usually not. Platters tolerate considerably more heat than the plastics around them, so a scorched casing rarely means scorched data. The real damage comes from acidic smoke residue and any water used to put the fire out.
More urgent than almost anything else. Corrosion continues for as long as contamination sits on the components, so unlike a mechanical fault this genuinely worsens week by week while the drive sits in a drawer.
Often, though it is harder. The residue is still there and has usually done more damage than it would have if the drive had come in wet. It is worth sending regardless — the diagnostic costs nothing.
From £300 plus VAT after a free 48-hour diagnostic, with a 50% deposit because clean-air and component-level work is committed up front. The balance is due only on success.
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.