Devices · the disk that travels in a bag
Open one up and you have a bare hard disk and a small bridge board wired in between that disk and the USB socket. Those boards fail on their own account, and on most models they are also holding the encryption keys. Factor in what a rucksack does to a spinning disk on the way across Plymouth, and there are two possible faults to separate before recovery begins.
You will be talking to an engineer
0800 6890668
| What shows up | What that points to | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The drive is not accessible. Windows offers to format it before it will open. | A lead pulled out during a write left the volume RAW; what sits below it is intact | Ignore that prompt |
| USB device not recognized — Windows can put no name to it | Nothing appears — the bridge or the disk | Try one other lead, then leave it |
| Device Manager lists it as Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) | Windows is handed no device identity whatever | The bridge has gone — bench job |
| Data error (cyclic redundancy check) — the drive will not open | Failing sectors on the disk behind it | Unplug it and leave it alone |
| Disk Management shows RAW, or Not Initialized | Windows cannot read the partition table, so it proposes wiping the lot | Refuse. Initialising finishes it. |
| Windows reports a malfunctioning USB device on every port tried | The 5V rail in the housing has failed, or the bridge has | Circuit boards fail long before platters ever do |
Whatever arrives is booked in under a case number on the day it reaches the bench. An engineer then works out the actual fault, and that part is free. You get a plain answer on what can come off the drive and what cannot, followed by one price in writing. Nothing further happens until you have read it and agreed.
One question comes before all the rest: has the housing failed, or has the disk? A great many externals turn up completely inert — LaCie and Iomega more than most — and the disk sitting behind that dead board turns out to be sound.
This is not a feature anyone enables; it ships enabled. The question that matters is which component performs it — the housing, or the disk. On most portables the bridge does it, so the keys live on that board and never reach the platters. Lift them off and sectors that looked like noise resolve into folders again.
Before any other step a hardware imager takes a sector-by-sector copy. Every rebuild is performed against that copy, never against the drive you sent. Whatever comes back goes home on new media, with return postage at our expense.
Thinking it over costs you nothing. Everything the drive gave up is listed for you before any invoice exists, and the bill only follows your go-ahead. Files travel back on media bought in for your job, with return carriage paid at this end, and the case stays on the bench until you confirm they open on your own computer.
Worth knowing: across 2023, people using SanDisk Extreme portable SSDs at 2TB and 4TB reported files vanishing with no warning at all. A US class action followed against Western Digital, and a firmware update issued while it was running settled nothing. Should yours be behaving oddly, get an image taken of it now.
The ticking started nine days before the hand-in. A matched donor stack was fitted, then the copy was taken at deliberately low speed. On a Passport the encryption keys sit on the bridge board, so that is where they were lifted from. Every chapter and reference came back, with a week left before the deadline.
No. Send everything as it stands, whatever state the shell is in. On most portables the encrypting is done by the USB board, not by the disk, so a perfectly good disk arriving by itself gives us ciphertext.
No. All that message means is that Windows has failed to identify the file system, and it tells you nothing at all about the contents. Agree to it and you overwrite the exact structures a rebuild would be worked out from.
Removal vans are unkind to disks: hours of vibration, a fair amount of being thrown about, and a change of temperature at the far end. A mechanism already marginal will often decline to spin up once it arrives. We see it constantly.
Almost always. Whatever shape the casing is in matters very little to us. Three things do: how the disk itself is, how its own circuit board is, and whether the bridge chip retains enough function to surrender the keys.
The diagnosis is free, and it comes back as a list: which files read, which do not, and what getting them off would take. Until then, leave the drive unplugged.