Soaked, sooty, or both
Inside the case there is a sealed area. Water cannot get into it, and most house fires are not hot enough to affect it. What does get wet or sooty is a component: the board, the connector, the contact strip, and components can be cleaned or replaced. What can never be undone is powering up a drive while it is still damp, or leaving it in a drawer for two weeks while salts dry onto the pins. Off, wet, bagged and, once you have your quote, in the post today from anywhere in Plymouth.
You will be talking to an engineer
0800 6890668
| The behaviour | What that points to | Where to start |
|---|---|---|
| Dead since the soaking | The board is done. Behind its seal the platters normally read just as before | Bag it and seal it while wet |
| It trips the socket, or finishes the power supply | A shorted board. Each retry sends another spike into the head preamp | Stop there and leave it |
| A white or green crust across the contacts | Corrosion has started and won't stop by itself | Do not let it sit about |
| Heat damage, the casing intact | The alloy body did its job. A ruined board is a part we can buy | Keep it closed, carry it flat |
| Soot driven into the breather filter and the pins | Acidic and abrasive. The first spin grinds its own surfaces | Leave the soot exactly where it is |
| Seawater reached it | Chloride makes its way past the board to the magnetic layer. Nothing wet is worse | Bag it damp, seal, get a quote, post |
Whatever is delivered is booked in using a unique reference (case number) on the date it arrives at the bench. The engineer will identify the actual fault at no charge. This gives a straightforward answer on what can be recovered from the drive and what cannot, plus one written quotation. There will be no further activity until you have read and accepted the quotation.
Your bagged drive should still be damp when it is opened here. This is exactly how we want it. If it dries out in transit, every mineral the water brought stays on the contacts and hardens into crystal. Fire jobs arrive untouched, soot included.
The deposits are removed and the contact strip is polished back to bare metal. A donor board matched to your drive is then fitted, with the ROM chip from your own board moved across to it.
Cleaning gives you some time, but that is all. Corrosion starts again. So the imaging happens that day. Once a complete sector-by-sector copy has been made, the drive is placed on a shelf and all further work runs on the copy.
Give yourself time to consider it. It costs you nothing. We list all of the files we recover for you before sending out an invoice, and we only ask for payment once you have authorised it. We also buy media specifically for your recovery and send it back to you, with the return postage paid by us. The case stays here on our bench until we have your confirmation that the files open properly on your own machine.
Most of these jobs come down to two things: did anyone try turning it on, and how long did it sit before the parcel went? Both are settled long before it reaches the bench. Not much of the work we do is dramatic. Almost none of it is to do with storms: a split pipe behind kitchen units, a washing machine emptying itself in the early hours, a flat roof that gave out during a wet week, an office at a holiday park where something went over the winter. All very ordinary jobs, and as long as the drive was neither dried nor plugged in, they go back as ordinary jobs.
Two things saved it: no one turned it on to test it, and no one tried to dry it. Still soaking wet, it was sealed in a bag and posted that same afternoon. On the bench the pads were cleaned, the ROM was moved to a donor board, and a few days later a complete image came off it. Twenty years of family photos went home.
Usually, provided two things went right: nobody turned it on while it was damp, and it got to the bench quickly. What the water kills is the circuit board. The platters are sealed away from all of that, and a circuit board is just a part to replace.
It doesn't. The water that matters is in a sealed housing that rice can't get into. Rice also creates problems of its own: starch dust, and grit settling onto the contacts. And every day it spends in the tub, the corrosion continues.
Often it is. The platters are held in an alloy body, and electronics damaged by heat are just parts to be replaced. The difficult cases are a distorted casing, or soot that has worked its way past the breather. It should come to us in the state it left the building: shut, not cleaned, and never plugged in.
No, and we know this goes against instinct. As the water evaporates it leaves behind whatever it carried, setting hard over the contacts and into every seam of the casing. Bag it damp. It should still be damp when an engineer opens the bag.
Diagnosis costs nothing. We give you a report listing which files can be read, which cannot, and what is needed to get them off. Do not connect the drive until then.