Oxford is the hand-over point — the Oxford Science Park drop-off, or the post. From there, every drive walks the same benches by the same route, whether it arrived from Oxford, Reading or Banbury. Consider this the tour: bench by bench, what each piece of kit is, what it does, and why it settles which recoveries work.
Intake write-blocking, imaging done in hardware, firmware repair, and a clean-air corner for the mechanical jobs — each job runs through the stations it needs and skips those it doesn't.
The first stage for any mechanical fault, and the one with the least margin for error.
A hard drive’s heads fly a fraction of the width of a human hair above the platter. A single particle of household dust in that gap is enough to gouge the surface, which is why any work inside the sealed chamber happens under filtered air rather than on a desk.
What actually happens there is precise rather than dramatic: a damaged head-stack lifted out and a matched donor set fitted without touching the platters; a seized drive’s platter pack transferred to a donor chassis with its rotational alignment preserved; heads bonded to the surface freed with tooling that lifts them vertically rather than dragging them across it. Each is a single-attempt operation, which is why the drive is imaged immediately afterwards rather than tested.
The step everything else depends on, and the clearest difference between a lab and a piece of software.
For the large category of faults where the mechanism is fine and the drive still reports nothing.
Hard drives keep their operating firmware in a reserved service area on the platters, and SSDs keep translation tables in an equivalent region of flash. When those become unreadable the device spins or powers up perfectly and reports zero capacity, a blank model, or a nonsensical size — while the user data sits untouched.
Manufacturer diagnostic modes allow that region to be read and repaired directly: damaged modules rebuilt or substituted from a matched donor, translators regenerated from surviving defect lists, ROM adaptives migrated when a board must be replaced. On SSDs the equivalent work reaches the controller in vendor mode to extract the mapping tables without which the NAND is undifferentiated data.
Where the physical work ends and the analysis begins.
Stripe size, disk order, parity rotation and data offset established by testing candidates against the data until reassembly produces coherent structures rather than noise.
mdadm beneath, LVM pools above, thin-provisioning metadata walked to locate real extents — the arrangement most NAS units use.
NTFS master file tables, APFS containers and checkpoints, ext superblocks and Btrfs trees, reconstructed from surviving copies.
Files recovered by signature when no file system survives — contents returned without names or folders, which is better than nothing and worth saying plainly.
Recovered files are opened in their applications. Anything unreadable is reported by name rather than returned as a file that opens to nothing.
Because the heads fly a fraction of the width of a human hair above the platter, and a single particle of household dust in that gap can gouge the surface. Any work inside the sealed chamber has to happen in filtered air rather than on a desk.
Control the read at a level software has no access to — per-head targeting, adjustable timeouts, and the ability to skip and log unreadable sectors rather than stalling on them. Crucially it is strictly read-only, so the source is never altered.
Repairing the reserved region where a drive keeps its own operating firmware. When those modules become unreadable the drive powers up perfectly and reports nothing — the user data is untouched, and manufacturer diagnostic modes allow the region to be rebuilt.
No, and that is not the aim. Repairs go only as far as needed to read the data once — a drive fitted with donor heads or a transplanted platter pack is a recovery vehicle rather than a usable disk. What you get back is your data on fresh media.
Never. Everything is imaged read-only and all reconstruction runs against the copy, so no attempt we make can reduce what is recoverable. That is the single most important difference between this and running software on the original.
Devices can be dropped at John Eccles House on the Oxford Science Park or sent by insured post, and all recovery is carried out in-house by our own engineers rather than subcontracted. Data remains in the UK throughout.
The first station is free: a diagnostic within 48 hours, then a written quote before any recovery begins.