A laptop recovered from a bedroom after a house fire — scorched casing, melted plastics, and then thoroughly soaked by what put the fire out. The platters, as is usually the case, were the least damaged part of it.
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A family lost most of a house to a kitchen fire. Insurance and rebuilding took priority, and it was four weeks before anyone thought about the laptop that had been in an upstairs bedroom — which held every family photograph taken since 2009.
It arrived in a carrier bag: casing scorched and partly melted, screen destroyed, and the whole machine carrying the sharp smell of fire residue.
no breach of the sealed chamber, so the platters had been protected from both smoke particulate and water.
acidic smoke residue combined with suppression water and four weeks of sitting had eaten into the traces and component legs.
the filtered vent that equalises pressure had admitted fine residue, though not enough to reach the head-flying surfaces.
platters tolerate far more temperature than the plastics around them, and these showed no thermal distortion.
The four-week delay was the real problem, not the fire. Corrosion is a continuing process, and residue left on a board for a month does considerably more damage than the same residue removed within days.
Decontamination first, before any power. The board was removed and cleaned with appropriate solvents to lift the acidic residue — simply drying it would have concentrated exactly what was causing the damage. Several corroded traces had to be rebuilt and two components replaced.
The drive was then opened under filtered clean air to clean the residue that had entered through the breather and to replace the internal filter. With the board repaired and the chamber clean, it was imaged read-only in a single planned pass — a decontaminated drive is not a restored drive, and it may only tolerate one read.
About 88% of the drive, including the overwhelming majority of the photograph library. The losses were bad sectors in regions where corrosion had affected the drive’s ability to read consistently, scattered rather than concentrated.
Photographs were verified by rendering and returned sorted by their embedded capture dates, which restored a usable chronology spanning fifteen years.
Fire rarely destroys the platters — the sealed chamber protects them, and they tolerate more heat than the machine around them. What does the damage is the aftermath: acidic smoke residue and suppression water, both of which corrode continuously until removed.
So these cases are genuinely time-critical in a way most recovery is not. Don’t dry it, don’t power it, and don’t leave it in a bag for a month. Seal it, send it, and let decontamination happen quickly. Water and fire damage recovery is from £300 +VAT with a 50% deposit, after a free 48-hour diagnostic.
Drop the drive at our Oxford Science Park reception, or post it to us — it costs nothing to find out what happened. You get a written figure from the fixed bands before any work begins.