Soaked, sooty, or both
Within the casing there is a sealed chamber. Water does not enter it, and a house fire is seldom hot enough to bother it. What does get wet or sooty is a component: the board, the connector, the contact strip. Components get cleaned or exchanged. What nobody can take back is a power-up while it is still damp, or two weeks in a drawer while salts dry onto the pins. Off, wet, bagged, in the post today, from wherever in Plymouth it sits.
You will be talking to an engineer
0800 6890668
| What happens | What that points to | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Dead since the soaking | The board is finished. Behind its seal the platters normally read exactly as before | Bag it and seal it while wet |
| It trips the socket, or finishes the power supply | A shorted board. Each retry puts another spike into the head preamp | Stop there and leave it |
| A white or green crust across the contacts | Corrosion has begun, and it will not halt 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. Spin it once and it grinds its own surfaces | Leave the soot exactly where it is |
| Seawater reached it | Chloride pushes past the board to the magnetic coating. Nothing wet is worse | Bag it damp, seal, post |
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.
A bagged drive is still damp when it is opened here, which is what we want. Should it dry out in transit, every mineral the water brought stays behind on the contacts, hardened into crystal. Fire work turns up untouched, soot and all.
The deposits are lifted off and the contact strip polished back to bare metal. A donor board matched to the drive is fitted, carrying across the ROM chip taken from your own.
Cleaning buys time and nothing else; the corrosion starts again. So the imaging happens that day. Once a complete sector-by-sector copy exists, the drive goes onto a shelf and everything after that runs on the copy.
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.
Most of these jobs come down to two things: whether the power was tried, and how many days passed before the parcel went. Neither gets settled at the bench; both are history by the time it arrives. Very little of this work is dramatic. Most of it has nothing to do with storms — a split pipe behind kitchen units, a washing machine emptying itself in the small hours, a flat roof that gave out during a wet week, an office at a holiday park where something went over the winter. Ordinary jobs, and they go back as ordinary jobs, as long as the drive was neither dried nor plugged in.
Two things saved it: nobody powered it up to see, and nobody tried drying it out. It went into the post that same afternoon, still wet, sealed inside a bag. On the bench the pads were cleaned, the ROM moved across to a donor board, and a few days later a full image came off it. Twenty years of family photographs went home.
Usually, provided two things went right: nobody switched it on while it was damp, and it got to the bench promptly. What water finishes off is the circuit board. Sealed away from all of that are the recording surfaces, and a board is only a part to be replaced.
It does not. The water that counts sits inside a sealed casing that rice has no way into. Rice contributes problems of its own as well — starch dust, grit settling on the contacts. And every day in the tub is a day spent corroding.
Often it is. Platters are held in by an alloy body, and electronics that have taken heat are parts to be replaced. The awkward ones 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, uncleaned, never plugged in.
No, and we know that runs against instinct. Whatever the water carried is left behind as the water evaporates, setting hard over the contacts and down into every seam of the casing. Bag it damp. It ought still to be damp when an engineer slits the bag open.
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.