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 40GB Hitachi IDE drive running an industrial machine, freezing at BIOS with £25,000 of hardware-tied control software on it. Cloned, not recovered.
A Maxtor DiamondMax overheating within minutes and smelling of burnt electronics. A failing voltage regulator, thermal bad sectors, and 97% recovered.
A laptop drive pulled from a house fire, soaked by the hose that put it out. Soot, corrosion and why speed mattered more than the heat did.
A Samsung SpinPoint identifying as a 32 MB device. Translator corruption repaired, and a full recovery from a drive that mis-described itself.
A Seagate Momentus 2.5″ IDE with a partly damaged Master File Table — files opening as garbled text, folders missing. Rebuilt from an image, 98% back.
A Toshiba laptop drive that spun perfectly and reported nothing. Service-area modules rebuilt until it enumerated, then imaged straight away.
A WD Red 4TB from a NAS that spun perfectly and identified as nothing. Service-area repair before imaging — the one case where the read-only rule has to bend.
A USB stick sheared off in a laptop port. The memory survived entirely — the damage was to the solder pads, and rebuilding them was the whole job.
An external Samsung NVMe running hot enough to crash, holding GCSE records and school databases. Controller reached in vendor mode, everything recovered.
A wedding shoot formatted in-camera by mistake. Why a quick format leaves every image in place, and how they were carved back by signature.
A student’s PNY stick showing as RAW and demanding to be formatted. The partition table had gone, not the research — and declining that prompt saved it.
A pocket SSD that stopped enumerating. Bridge board or drive controller? Separating the two decided the whole approach.
An accounting firm locked out of its Iomega backup drive. Corrupt NTFS permissions rather than encryption — and why that distinction decided everything.
A LaCie Rugged throwing an I/O device error with A-Level coursework on it. Degrading heads, bad sectors, and a full recovery before the deadline.
A mirrored My Book Duo where both disks were healthy and the enclosure was not. Why the RAID lived in the box, and how the mirror was rebuilt outside it.
A My Passport shucked from its case after it stopped working, and the bare drive read as unformatted. The key lives on the bridge, not the disk.
A postgraduate’s IBM Deskstar clicking on power-up with three years of research on it. Donor heads under clean air, no platter scoring, and 97% back.
An NVMe SSD that disappeared overnight with no warning. Controller failure reached in vendor mode, translation tables read, and the NAND imaged intact.
A Fujitsu Lifebook drive with bad sectors spreading. Multi-pass imaging with the good regions banked first, and why a single sweep would have failed.
Laptop data recovery in Oxford where the laptop was dead but the drive was perfect. Why the machine failing rarely means the data has.
A VAIO dropped while running, with both a seized motor and damaged heads. Two mechanical faults in sequence, and one careful read at the end of it.
MacBook data recovery when the Mac boots to a black screen and the SSD is undetected. Blade SSD imaged, APFS rebuilt, and why soldered models differ.
A MacBook Fusion Drive making scraping noises — heads on the platter. Why both halves were needed, and what was never coming back.
A dead-board MacBook with soldered, encrypted flash. Why no lab can recover this, what a chip-off would actually yield, and what to do instead.
A twenty-five-year-old IDE drive from a retired Compaq, read once through a period-correct interface. Donor scarcity, FAT32 and one careful pass.
Files vanished from a Dell Inspiron SSD with TRIM running. Why pulling the power fast saved 80%, and why nothing recovers the rest.
A Gateway desktop whose motor would not turn. Platter pack transferred to a donor chassis with alignment preserved, then imaged in one pass.
A power cut mid-write left an SSD unable to present itself. Why mapping tables break that way, and how the drive was brought back to a readable state.
PC data recovery in Oxford where the partition vanished but the files did not. How a missing partition is rebuilt from the volume metadata.
Drobo data recovery on a six-bay unit offline after two simultaneous failures. Donor head-stack work, then BeyondRAID reconstructed from images.
A vet practice’s six-disk QNAP RAID 5 converted to RAID 0 by a misconfiguration. Why that overwrites metadata rather than data, and how it was rebuilt.
A pharmaceutical company’s five-bay Synology running degraded with two drives scraping. Why that state is the most dangerous of all.
A twelve-bay Synology reinitialised during a migration. Why initialising writes metadata rather than data, and how the original layout was recovered.
An eight-disk RAID 6 that lost one member too many during a rebuild. Imaged worst-first and reassembled from copies, without the array running again.
An IBM RAID 5 whose controller configuration was reset, leaving eight healthy SAS disks and no array. Rebuilt by deriving the geometry.
A four-disk RAID 0 taken offline by a single failed member. How the stripe was reassembled from images and what the failed disk decided about the outcome.
A two-disk mirror where both members had bad sectors. How two incomplete images were merged into one complete volume, and why a rebuild would have lost it.
RAID 5 data recovery on an 8-disk Inspur array throwing I/O errors from bad sectors across several members. Imaged read-only, geometry re-derived, 98% back.
A RAID controller whose firmware update left it unable to see its own array. Six healthy disks, no configuration, geometry rebuilt by analysis.
BitLocker recovery on a laptop where the recovery key was lost. What BitLocker recovery actually involves, how long it takes and what is needed.
A LockBit attack on a machine with no working backup. Nothing was decrypted — here is what was recovered around it, and how much that turned out to be.
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