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 drive that beeped, refused to disconnect, and had to be pulled — with a film to finish in a week.
A drive whose connection depends on physical position and lasts about thirty seconds at a time.
A nearly new drive that failed mid-playback, making a repetitive chattering nobody has a name for.
A drive that lists its top level reliably and stops dead the moment anything deeper is requested.
A drive that often refuses to be recognised and, when it does mount, still will not open its files.
An owner who tried once, found advice telling him not to try again, and followed it.
A dropped drive with one visible detail that supports two opposite conclusions. Case 2,100.
A steady indicator where a flickering one belongs, and what the difference between them reports.
A socket bent by forcing a connector in against its keying, and two possible ways out.
A drive the computer announces and then cannot show, and what the chime actually confirms.
An alarming message with no specifics, on a drive holding the only pictures of two children as babies.
A drive posted internationally which "doesn't have any of the film footage that was initially transferred" from a friend's camera.
A decade of photographs on a drive used for regular backups, which suddenly asked to be wiped.
A drive that mounts, lets files be browsed, and fails at the same point every time.
Two drives with opposite problems, and a workaround that risks destroying the better one.
A drive holding a photo library shortcut rather than the library, and an owner who stopped in time.
A drive coaxed back into view by a diagnostic tool, now visible and barely responsive.
A brand-new drive that failed within weeks, holding the only copy, with a warranty decision attached.
A drive needing a head replacement, held up by the one thing that cannot be improvised.
A twenty-minute freeze ended by a forced shutdown, with the external drive still connected.
A whirring drive and a diagnosis found online that does not quite match the symptom.
A cable that came half out during use, and a drive that has not worked since.
A drive a second machine identifies by product name while presenting no volume at all.
An indicator that keeps burning long after the drive behind it has stopped trying.
A drive that came back to life for one session, interrupted by an owner who acted on what he heard.
A project file edited directly on a portable drive, and an application crash that took the volume with it.
A dropped drive whose seized spindle was freed by hand, converting a stuck drive into a clicking one.
A drive reporting incorrect parameters that offers to format itself and then declines to do it.
A drive that vanished from one computer's startup listing and appears as a physical device on another.
A large drive that failed despite light use, and why sparing a drive does not extend its life.
A drive cycling through the same failed start-up over and over, with a faint grinding during each attempt.
A drive listed by the system with a specific failure code, and an owner updating drivers to fix it.
A drive that reports a different complaint each time, which says more than any one of them would.
An old enclosure signalling in unison, which is a message rather than a sign of activity.
A failing drive that takes the operating system down with it before anything can be copied.
A drive that no longer spins, where nearly all the content is replaceable and a little of it is not.
A large external that now reports thirty-two gigabytes, after being used to build system installation media.
The two thousand one hundred and fiftieth file in this archive turns on two things that were not observed.
A drive that gave three warnings in sequence before it stopped, and what each one meant.
A drive whose sound changed character, from an owner who knew what it normally sounded like.
A partition tool left running for three weeks on a failing drive, ended by an unexpected restart.
A drive with a colour-coded indicator that changed, and a rumour about the cause worth testing.
An archive drive from a long-idle machine, browsable in full and impossible to copy from.
A laptop that failed without warning, except for the thing that had been happening for weeks.
A drive used as a computer's primary storage rather than its backup, which changes what is at stake.
A drive that failed on one computer, worked on another, and then failed on that one too.
A drive that failed with no recent cause, and an old incident the owner almost did not mention.
A drive removed after a crash a decade ago and connected for the first time since.
A pair that failed together, one of which is empty, with no way to tell which.
A drive that tries a fixed number of times before giving up, described precisely by its owner.
A collection of old laptop drives, none of which respond to the same connector.
A built-in test that failed a drive and issued a reference number, and what the number reports.
A machine that froze, a forced reset, and a noise that was not there before.
A secure USB stick broken against a bookcase, where the encryption changes the answer more than the break does.
A USB stick the computer detects as a drive with no medium in it, reporting zero bytes used and free.
A portable drive dropping its connection at random, whose owner cannot say whether the transfer finished.
A stick tested with five recovery programs that all returned nothing, which is one result rather than five.
A memory stick that vanished mid-use and now prompts a computer to install a driver it never needed.
A stick where the old files are perfect, the recent ones are gone, and the folder names remain.
A small solid-state drive that has stopped, and what physical damage even means on one.
A stick left in a shared machine all day, found hot and no longer recognised.
A stick that lists everything correctly, reports the right space used, and yields nothing readable.
A stick kept for years in hope, with its casing gone and no sign of life.
Two solid-state drives that stopped together, and a belief that they are beyond recovery.
A drive that works for a moment or two, shows what is on it, and drops off the machine.
A stick that lost years of work and acquired a default label it never had before.
A stick that carried hundreds of hours of editing work and stopped responding after long service.
A stick bent at ninety degrees inside a laptop, and the repair that counted as a second bend.
A card that stopped working after a label was removed, exposing the contacts underneath.
A solid-state drive that got measurably worse between one day and the next.
A backup that turned out to be a transfer, onto a stick that then stopped working.
A sync that propagated the wrong way, on the one kind of device where deletion can be final.
Photographs deleted during a transfer, on a stick that has been left alone ever since.
A camcorder that moved footage to a card, emptied its own storage, and left the card with nothing on it.
A bent memory card whose visible parts survived, and the connections inside the laminate that did not.
Photographs copied from a card, the source deleted on the strength of that, and the earliest ones missing.
Deleted footage on a card that has been used heavily since, and the honest arithmetic of what remains.
A wedding card that failed during playback on the camera, hours after the day it recorded.
A memory card broken during removal, holding footage of a road accident.
A camera card whose contact strip is marked, and whether minimal damage there matters.
A card formatted in a camera, where the question is whether the flash was told to blank itself.
A broadcast card that failed alone, with thirty minutes of footage and a built-in control group.
A card that was only being read from, and came back reported as entirely corrupted.
A card reading as raw, deteriorating with each connection, removed and bagged before it got worse.
An action camera card with a clean split down the middle, and only one file actually wanted.
A graduation shoot on a card that stopped between one day and the next, with a format prompt waiting.
A broadcast card the operator can play back on the camera, which a computer reports as uninitialised.
A card sold as 128 gigabytes that failed after three hours of footage, and the arithmetic that follows.
A transfer between two cards that appeared to finish, leaving almost nothing on the destination.
A knowledgeable owner asking for chip-level reading by name, on a card that may not have a separate chip.
A card reported as raw holding raw photographs, where the same word describes unrelated problems.
A card that was working at bedtime and gone by morning, with nothing running in between.
A holiday card damaged in an unfamiliar slot, thousands of miles from anywhere that can help.
A card the device declared unsupported, and a format attempt that stalled a fifth of the way through.
A broadcast recording card wiped in the camera, where consumer tools cannot reach it properly.
A card where files up to a point open normally and everything later does not.
A direct question about whether a device refusing to appear says anything about its contents.
A camera card holding a week of pictures where several years used to be.
A drive greyed out in the disk utility, whose owner knows exactly how long it usually takes to return.
A backup drive that stopped mounting after a system upgrade, and a decision about where to spend money.
Conflicting advice about a water-damaged laptop — whether the drive can come out at all is settled by the model, not by opinion.
A verbatim utility output where the repair ran, failed, and deliberately restored the prior state.
A machine too old for its maker to service, with a dead screen and a drive that does not care.
A machine wiped after an update went wrong, where the age of the machine decides everything.
An erased machine where the recovered files are unreadable, and the reason is not the software.
A machine still under warranty that will not power on, and an institution's data on board.
A long-serving machine that starts, reports it cannot find a system, and stops there.
A drive written in a native format, unreadable on the very machines that should read it.
A storage module removed from a laptop that may never be repaired, and the connector it uses.
A drive whose electronics were fixed successfully, where the photo library is still nowhere.
A recovery environment that loaded perfectly and found nothing to work on.
Every official step followed to its end, by a service whose objective was never the data.
A business network unit hit by ransomware, and the copies that may have survived it.
A storage pool deleted and reconfigured on the strength of a backup that turned out to be incomplete.
A network drive removed from its enclosure, which the computer lists but cannot read.
A server that gets as far as its array and no further, after the power failed at the weekend.
A two-disk mirror that should have survived losing a member, and did not.
An array that tolerates two failures, reporting three, after a weekend power cut.
A large installation where only three members failed a scan, and where those three sit matters.
A two-drive home network unit that stopped working, with both disks apparently healthy inside it.
A two-drive storage box that has named which of its disks it considers failed.
A lab appliance where a user deletion was mostly undone from the built-in bin, and a remainder was not.
A network-connected drive rendered unreachable by a service being discontinued rather than by any fault.
A two-drive enclosure with one member missing, which presented itself exactly one time.
A careful substitution test on a failing appliance, and the assumption hiding inside it.
An 85-megabyte disk from a hobby restoration that the firmware sees and no modern adapter can read.
A commercial vehicle camera damaged in a road traffic incident, holding footage that will be examined.
Home video burned to disc on a recorder that has since died, leaving discs most machines read as blank.
A drive from a studio machine, soaked while unpowered, holding a volume no ordinary computer will read.
A single diskette from decades ago, and what survives on a magnetic medium that thin.
A drive stored damp a decade ago, holding design files and the authorisation that makes the software open them.
House documents handed over on a single disc that broke during a move, with no other copy anywhere.
A games console hard drive that works perfectly and will not give up a single file.
A proprietary memory card from a discontinued format, showing space used and no files.
A legacy machine being preserved, where the attempt to copy it finished off the original.
A camcorder disc interrupted while writing its table of contents, with the other side finished cleanly.
A photographer's legacy computer and the external drive that has stopped answering it.
A machine that offered instructions after a failure, and an owner who did as he was told.
A partition format that did not stop where it was told, on a drive whose backup turns out to be partial.
A laptop that stopped booting, and an attempt to reach the data that wrote to the disk instead.
A laptop that encrypted itself during an upgrade, with no key in the owner's account and a possible third party involved.
A machine that crashed and restarted into a message about a missing system, with urgent-sounding advice.
A laptop locked by an attack years ago, left alone, with music files still wanted.
A drive that came partly back after an automatic repair, then vanished again after a manual one.
A partition resize that went wrong, and took the copy on the backup drive with it.
Photographs lost to a factory restore long ago, on a machine barely used since.
Installation media written to the wrong drive, where the structure survived and the contents did not.
A container-encrypted work drive wiped by accident, and removed from use immediately afterwards.
An accidental format followed by a small amount of new data, and the arithmetic that follows from it.
Two partitions the system can see and cannot measure, with a check that stops partway.
A system update that left an error she cannot get past, where she "used a data recovery program which has allowed me to see that my original files are still.
A consistency check reporting that the primary and its spare had both failed, at opposite ends of the volume.
A partition-level operation that took the whole drive, and one folder that mattered.
A drive given more voltage than it was built for, and the smoke that followed.
A laptop that kept working after liquid reached it, stopped charging, and was set aside until now.
A laptop given the right treatment by the wrong method, and an owner willing to let the machine go.
A laptop that overheated when its cooling failed, caught in time, now reaching a grey screen and stopping.
A burnt component on a drive's circuit board, and the reasonable assumption that a replacement will do.
A 1TB drive that "is just saying it is corrupt and wants to reconfigure", which he thinks "may have been left overnight in the boot of a car during a cold.
A multi-drive unit soaked by water from elsewhere in the building, with work on it.
An owner asking for a platter transfer who has correctly diagnosed an electronic fault, which needs something simpler.
A customer who arrives with an accurate technical diagnosis, and what that changes about the work.
A prior recovery that returned gaps and duplicates, and what that pattern says about how it was done.
A laptop repair that fixed the machine by reinstalling over the drive holding everything.
A dropped laptop, an amateur attempt a year ago, and whether that has spoiled the chances.
A laboratory machine holding bespoke software with no vendor, no installer and no second copy.
A careful two-stage transfer where the last stage silently dropped files, and emails arrived hollow.
A machine sent away for a lid repair under insurance, returned with its storage cleared.
A trade enquiry where the file sizes, not the capacity, determine how hard the recovery will be.
A verdict containing two observations and one conclusion, which do not stand or fall together. Case 2,200.
A flash drive whose controller was replaced, with the memory chip proposed next.
A drive described as holding a backup of everything, which on inspection is the sole location of all of it.
A deliberate factory reset performed in the belief that everything was backed up, and the honest answer.
A card that failed on a month-long trip, and an enquiry that states its ceiling before asking anything else.
A drive holding private material, four partitions, and one of them reading far more slowly than the rest.
Two laptops and a drive soaked in a flood, and what an insurer actually needs from the assessment.
An organisation's machine returned by a departing member of staff with its drive apparently wiped.
Three old laptops nobody can log into, and the difference between a login and encryption.
A drive still readable with difficulty, and an owner who has decided not to wait for it to stop.
A drive where nearly everything exists somewhere else, and one thing does not.
A backup drive that failed at the moment it was needed, holding photographs of a late husband.
A drive removed from a dead laptop, and an owner who wants to understand the assessment before agreeing to it.
A previous recovery that returned a terabyte of numbered files nobody could identify.
An old machine bound for disposal, holding photographs worth keeping and data worth destroying.
A collection of failed drives and an owner who can only pay for one recovery at a time.
An owner who has diagnosed the fault himself and proposed the repair, confidently and not quite correctly.
A card that has been reused since the loss, and an honest answer about what that leaves.
An assignment that vanished at a keystroke, on a laptop that is working perfectly.
A commercial shoot on a failed drive, where urgency and capacity pull in opposite directions.
A drive its owner would rather hand over than post, and how a drive should actually travel.
A figure that felt too high and a promise nobody would make, on a drive still held elsewhere.
An enquiry apologising for the details it lacks, which already contains the ones that matter.
A charity asking for a success rate, and why the number alone would tell them nothing.
A recovery screen navigated in hope, and an owner who is not sure what they agreed to.
A drive nothing detects, and an owner reasonably assuming that means it must come apart.
A description with no technical vocabulary in it, which is more useful than one that has.
A failed drive removed, the laptop back in service, and an unhurried recovery.
A technical owner asking for a byte-level copy and nothing more, on unfamiliar filesystems.
A drive opened before the research was done, and a self-reproach resting on an ambiguous word. Case 2,250.
Disk order is part of the array structure. What happens when members are pulled to test them, and how the original sequence is derived from the disks.
Encryption and hardware failure are separate problems that have to be solved in a particular order. Why the drive is imaged before the key is applied.
On several external ranges the encryption key lives on the USB bridge board, not the disk. Why removing the drive from its case makes the data unreadable.
Decrypting a volume in place rewrites every sector. What happens when that process stops partway, leaving half the disk encrypted and half not.
A NAS that answers on the network but presents no shares has a working operating system and a broken volume. Why that is good news, and what not to run.
Adding a disk to a NAS rewrites the array layout while it runs. What happens when that process is interrupted, and why the old layout is still recoverable.
Drobo BeyondRAID and similar proprietary arrays use layouts no standard tool reads. Why a dead chassis is the real risk, and how these are reconstructed.
A firmware or BIOS recovery can clear a controller's array configuration, leaving healthy disks with no logical volume. How the geometry is derived back.
What is actually recoverable after an encryption run, why nobody decrypts current strains, and the first-day decisions that determine the outcome.
Storage Spaces, mdadm and dynamic disks fail differently from hardware RAID. How software arrays are reconstructed when the host will not import them.
A drive appearing as 1MB, 2MB or 8MB has entered a controller safe mode. What that means, why the flash is usually intact, and what not to try.
A power event can drop multiple array members at once. Why the second disk is often healthy, what stranded cache writes do, and why not to rebuild.