In-depth write-ups of real data recoveries we’ve carried out in Belfast — the fault, the diagnosis, the technique and the outcome, across hard drives, SSDs, RAID, NAS and more. Every job is diagnosed and recovered in-house. Names and identifying details are kept confidential.
A drive that failed over a weekend, with the last successful write precisely dated. Why that timestamp is worth having.
A list of troubleshooting steps with a repair utility among them. Why one item on that list writes to the drive.
An owner who reported what did not happen to her drive. Why the absence of an event narrows things considerably.
A destination drive overwritten by a clone, then reformatted, then merged. Why each remedy wrote more.
A drive tested exhaustively across computers and systems. Why the answer arrived long before the testing stopped.
A multi-filesystem drive used as an installer target by mistake. Why a mixed layout gives more to rebuild from.
A copy the system estimates in months rather than hours. Why that figure is itself the diagnosis.
A drive that appears for a moment and drops away every time. Why that repeating cycle points at power, not data.
A drive that was working when plugged in and unreadable by morning, untouched throughout. Why nothing the owner did is the point.
A drive that locked up mid-deletion and now freezes on access, with a deep sound. Why the sound changes the response.
A drive that made a noise, carried on working when replugged, and then stopped for good. Why the reprieve was the cost.
A computer crash the same week an external drive started clicking. Whether one caused the other, and why it barely matters.
A drive that began sounding one morning and vanished from both a Mac and a PC. Why his own conclusion was right.
A new folder of family pictures copied from a tablet that vanished from the drive afterwards. What that appearance meant.
A drive that crashed three times over three days, each fixed by a restart, and failed on the fourth. What the restarts were.
A drive used outdoors that came back blinking rapidly and invisible. Why the location may matter more than it seems.
A drive holding software that no longer exists to download, with a knocking sound and a well-meant wrong diagnosis.
A drive ticking and straining, holding photographs that exist nowhere else. Why effort is not progress.
A drive knocked off a desk whose fall seemed cushioned, working intermittently afterwards and now silent. What was missed.
A dropped drive now showing a few files, and the same data gone from a cloud account at the same time. Two losses, one plan.
A drive spinning audibly with a rising tone and three machines that cannot see it. What that particular sound indicates.
A drive that stopped mounting after the computer froze, showing power but no activity at all. What a still light means.
A knocked drive producing a steady pulse felt rather than heard, once per second, on two machines. What that rhythm is.
A dropped drive whose integrity scan reported unreadable areas. What that finding does and does not establish.
An owner who removed an enclosure without breaking the drive's seal, and said so precisely. Why that sentence matters.
A machine that would not boot, diagnosed using a component that had nothing to do with the fault.
A monitoring tool showing a large reallocation count. Why that number means the failure is not recent.
A failing drive holding a great deal of content, very little of it wanted. Why scoping is not only about cost.
An enclosure whose indicator fails only with a drive attached. Why that test points the opposite way to his conclusion.
A drive that stopped working years ago and has sat since. What survives dormancy and what does not.
A drive that returns data with difficulty and refuses to accept any. Why that combination names the fault exactly.
A bare drive on an adapter that kept running after the computer shut down. Why nothing was managing its power.
A photo drive that shows power and does nothing else. Why an indicator is the least informative sign a drive gives.
A drive taken out by a failing power supply, and an owner who only wants some of it back. Where the damage stops.
A drive that failed during the backup meant to protect it, with most files already across. How to know exactly what is missing.
A drive that beeps on connection and is never recognised. Why the internet diagnosis of insufficient power is backwards.
Two old external drives, stripped of their enclosures years ago, spinning on a bare adapter and unreadable. Why the casing mattered.
Two drives from the same drawer that failed differently. Why identical storage conditions produced two separate faults.
A 2009 storage drive that will not turn, noticed when the owner went to add more photographs. What stops platters turning.
A drive that starts, stops, and then reports a fraction of its capacity as uninitialised. Why that figure is a misreading.
A drive given the wrong power supply, then connected directly, producing a burning smell. Why everything stops now.
A drive that announced imminent failure, then worked partially, then not at all. What that warning is and how long it lasts.
A year of family photographs missing, and an old failed backup drive that might hold them. Acting on an unverifiable hope.
A drive used for a single backup and never since, which will not spin when finally needed. Two lessons in one device.
A drive that shows up in the file browser, never takes its name, and never opens. What that particular stall means.
A twenty-year-old drive that lists everything and transfers nothing. Why listing and reading are different operations.
A drive that failed a day ago, tested once to confirm the fault, then stopped and stored. Very close to ideal handling.
A drive whose read rate falls to zero at the exact moment a faint whirring resumes. A correlation that settles the diagnosis.
A drive that spins and can be heard attempting to read, described by an owner careful to say what it is not.
The same material on three devices, each broken in a different way. Why that is three chances rather than one disaster.
A drive found very hot with a dim indicator and no rotation, after being left running when it should have been idle.
A drive present in the file browser that returns different errors depending on which file is opened.
A drive opened years ago to inspect the platters, closed again, and left since. What that inspection could and could not see.
A transfer that corrupted half a library, with the counts not adding up. Why that arithmetic finds two faults.
A precise procedural question about soldered storage. The answer is yes, and two things decide whether it works.
A warranty replacement arriving before the old drive has been read. The terms that decide whether he keeps it.
A card that failed during an upgrade somebody else requested. Why old cards fail at exactly that moment.
A stick that lights up and appears nowhere. Why a small amount of flexing is enough to break the board inside.
A solid-state drive that makes every tool and repair fail. Why a drive can take the software down with it.
A stick that dropped off during a copy and now registers nowhere. Why the interruption is the likely cause of the fault.
A portable solid-state drive that grew slow to appear, then reported no medium at all. Why the delay was the warning.
A flash drive whose casing looks like the obstacle. Why the construction inside decides the work, not the shell.
A film drive that failed between projects, with an owner who needs it working and needs it read. Why those are two jobs.
A solid-state drive that vanished when the computer reported a critical failure and shut down. Where the fault actually sits.
A portfolio drive that appears among devices, reports itself as working, and never reaches disk management. What that gap means.
Four recovery programs run against an unallocated solid-state drive, all finding nothing. Why they never had a chance.
A stick reformatted in error, then scanned by online tools that showed nothing. Why the tools mattered less than the stopping.
A solid-state drive the machine still lists and will no longer start from. Two different questions with one symptom.
A stick reported as uninitialised, and an owner who read what that meant and deliberately did nothing. The decision that mattered.
A trade enquiry reasoning from a drive's history that its memory must be sound. Where that inference holds and where it stops.
A laptop killed by the accessory plugged into it, and a drive pulled out afterwards that shows nothing in an enclosure.
A drive reporting full activity and high latency while returning almost nothing. What those two figures together mean.
A second drive that crashes every machine it is connected to, before or after start-up. What a system-level crash indicates.
A solid-state drive that failed mid-session and left the computer unable to start at all. Why a drive can stop a machine.
A proprietary laptop drive and two adapters that both failed to present it. Why the fit was never the whole problem.
A stick opened by its owner in search of a replacement controller. Why that particular swap does not work on flash.
A system drive that failed while the machine was running, dropping the user straight out. Why a boot drive cannot fail quietly.
Experimental data on a stick where a research team recovered the directory and none of the contents. What that gap means.
A solid-state drive that begins its start-up, gets partway, and never presents itself. Where that sequence breaks.
A work stick that froze a laptop mid-download and now shows itself briefly before vanishing again.
A work stick that stopped being recognised anywhere after a machine performed an automatic shutdown during use.
A card damaged by nothing in particular over several years. Why cumulative handling is a real failure mode.
A photographer whose card failed mid-event. The camera setting that may already have solved it.
A camera reporting that it cannot identify what is on its own card. What that message says about the structure.
Filmed interviews on a card rejected by every device. Why the material type changes what recovery should aim at.
A card formatted by a helpful stranger, then tested with a new photograph. Why each well-meant step cost something.
A card that failed inside a phone and is invisible to a laptop, after every built-in tool was tried. What each attempt did.
Six hundred raw photographs lost from a card and emptied from a computer's bin. Two routes to the same images.
Three corrupted cards from one trip and a bare laptop drive. Why the cards are separate jobs and the drive is the simple one.
A campaign shoot where the card worked all week and failed at the end. Why the final day is when cards fail.
A card recovered from a phone crushed in the road, undamaged to look at but warming in every reader. What the heat means.
A videographer's card that checked out fine and vanished before the backup. Why the gap between checking and copying matters.
A card that a different camera offered to format, switched off immediately, with the images gone. What that moment cost.
A card unreadable in three devices, and an owner asking what can honestly be said before anyone has seen it.
A card corrupted at the moment the camera failed mid-shoot. Two suspects, one of which is not the card.
A memory card with a broken case and a hairline crack from being bent. Why it must not go into a reader.
Photographs deleted from a card, and an owner who once watched a company recover a customer's lost pictures. The precedent holds.
A card corrupted while apps were moved between phone and card, where the file list survives and the images will not open.
Dive footage reviewed on the camera screen and then unreadable everywhere. What the successful playback proves.
A card three-quarters full whose clip folder shows empty, with most files recovered and a handful still missing.
An hour of footage that never copied across, on a card since wiped and used again. Where the missing clips actually sat.
A card demanding to be formatted, holding a single large file its owner needs. Why one big file is its own problem.
A memory card recovered from a camera struck in the road, cosmetically undamaged and unreadable everywhere.
Small previews surviving in a phone's own cache while the full images have gone. What that proves and what it provides.
A card that failed mid-way through a wedding, with the morning's photographs on it and the message that stopped everything.
A phone that reported a write failure before the photographs became unviewable. The warning that came first.
A card that failed mid-transfer, a quotation for reading its memory directly, and what actually drives that figure.
A drive pulled from a crashed machine years ago and kept for the photographs. Why setting it aside was the right instinct.
A backup drive that stopped during a backup, now vibrating and flickering. Why the backup was the demanding part.
A documents folder gone from a healthy computer, with the bin already empty. Why a working machine is the urgent case.
A legacy-interface drive tested on four borrowed machines with four different results. What the one that worked proved.
A laptop showing the symbol that means no system was found, with recovery options and a second machine both failing.
A fifteen-year-old Mac that died the day before the transfer, holding the only copy of a photo library. Case 1,750.
A folder removed from a Mac and from the external drive holding the same folder. Why the second copy did not help.
A photographer's drive absent from the system, and a remedy aimed at the computer's own settings. Fixing the wrong layer.
A repair shop that tried a full backup on a failing drive, which crashed and left the machine unable to start.
A laptop with a broken screen whose connections failed one by one, and a drive nobody believes is faulty.
An encrypted drive disconnected mid-copy that now refuses to open, and a machine that rejects it internally too.
Two old laptops set aside years ago, whose owner is afraid testing them will do harm. What the real risk is.
A photo application whose albums and structure matter as much as the images. Whether a recovery returns files or a working library.
A drive removed from a machine that has since been fixed, where the machine itself may have held the key.
A parity array on a server with more than one drive down. Why the order of failure decides what can be assembled.
A network unit signalling a coded fault. Why counting them and looking them up is the first free step.
A RAID server whose owner, unwell and not thinking clearly, entered the configuration utility. The 1,700th case file.
A home network drive that vanished from the network. Two very different faults look identical from a computer.
A drive pulled from a network enclosure that a computer cannot read. The format question the owner already suspected.
A mirrored pair where one drive was formatted in error. Why mirroring means the other drive holds everything.
A network unit declared dead with a reusable drive inside, and an owner who wants to be certain before wiping it.
A network drive reset to solve a connection problem, which cleared the password instead. What a reset does and does not erase.
A network drive with surface damage where the owner wants one category of content and nothing else. Why that changes the job.
A parity array that lost one member, then lost another during the days it took a replacement to arrive.
A network drive whose maker has ended support, leaving its owner unable to log in to storage he owns outright.
A striped pair disconnected for a clean install and reported failed on return. Where the array's description actually lived.
A machine that runs perfectly behind a broken display. The free solution most people do not think of.
An automatic repair that runs at every boot and never finishes. Why the loop is doing damage nobody chose.
An enquiry that supplies a model number and a verdict but not a symptom. Why the specification is not the diagnosis.
A power interruption followed by a message that the drive cannot be reached. Why the helpdesk steps were the wrong ones.
An intermittent drive and a check utility that found corrupt files. Why the check is unreliable and its repairs are worse.
A storage drive that vanished, refuses to initialise with an error, and tones at startup. Why refusing was the good news.
A start-up code reporting the drive could not be read, with three sounds from the drive. Two observations, one fault.
A drive that failed mid-transfer between two different operating systems and is now unreadable by both.
A precisely described volume lost when a machine froze and restarted. Why the detail he supplied shortens the work.
A document that reverted to a copy from two weeks earlier overnight. Why recovery software cannot find last night's work.
A drive returning a permissions message while whirring away, with a disk check finding orphans and stopping. What it means.
A deleted work folder that recovery software locates but cannot restore usably. Why finding is not the same as recovering.
A clean system reinstall carried out before the desktop files were secured. What a format leaves, and what the install removes.
An owner who has identified his drive's specific failure mode and holds outdated backups. Where that leaves the job.
A laptop that powers up in every visible way except the display, and an owner who has left it alone.
A laptop naming the drive as the fault, with a repairer adding overheating and possible liquid. Three findings to separate.
A drive listing a single startup file while reporting nearly full, after a chain of changes to the machine around it.
A laboratory that fitted donor heads twice without success. Why the second failure names the real fault.
A trade diagnosis performed by booting from external media. What the result narrows it to, and why the test was right.
A drive that gave out during the lightest task a computer performs. Why the search for a cause leads nowhere.
A trusted technician who changed the drive and attempted recovery before the owner came to a lab. What that changes.
A drive another company assessed as a head-stack failure. What that finding means and what it commits the work to.
A technician's diagnosis explained plainly, and the one fault where every further power-up does the damage.
An owner who described the head swap, the donor match and the imaging himself. What his account gets right and what it leaves out.
A trade enquiry where built-in tests ran and an external reader showed nothing. What the built-in diagnostic cannot see.
A drive assessed elsewhere, with a file list produced and a figure given. What that quote already tells him.
A drive counting out the same five sounds at every start-up. What a consistent count reveals about the failure.
A dropped laptop returned working, with the original drive handed back unrecovered. Why that separation was done correctly.
A Mac declined by two repairers, the second of whom removed the drive and stopped. Why each refusal was correct.
A high-street shop that attempted a transfer and could not complete it. What the attempt itself reveals and costs.
A retailer recovery that returned long-deleted material and none of the current photographs. Why that pattern is diagnostic.
A drive assessed elsewhere as needing donor heads, where no matching donor could be sourced. What that constraint really is.
A drive presenting its system volume while the data volume stays invisible. Why that split is diagnostic and hopeful.
A dropped laptop where a previous attempt retrieved part of the data, and a fair question about paying twice for it.
A computer buried in building dust, and a quote listing three procedures. How to read a quotation that reads like a menu.
A technician who eliminated every host variable before enquiring, and asked what information would move things along.
A laptop that will not charge, where the storage cannot be removed and a retailer has quoted for advanced work.
A transfer entrusted to a repairer, an empty external drive returned, and nobody checking whether it worked.
An archive project built from decades-old media in formats that no longer have readers. Three dependencies, not one.
A legacy-interface drive bought a dock to read, now clicking. Whether the dock or the drive is the thing at fault.
A relic server collected from a client, with a failed drive on an obsolete interface and no record of what ran on it.
An institutional enquiry about personal data and its destruction. Why a recovery multiplies copies before reducing them.
Two old laptops due for recycling, one with a forgotten login. Why that password protects nothing on the disk.
A folder discovered missing half a decade later. Why one question decides this, and it is not about the deletion.
A working drive and a working account, and an owner defeated only by the size of the transfer. Not a recovery at all.
An encrypted multi-partition drive whose owner holds every key. Why that inverts the usual encryption problem entirely.
A research drive that hangs and then crashes every computer it touches. What that severity means, and what to do when funds are short.
Deleted photographs a scan displayed as thumbnails behind a payment. What a preview proves, and what it does not.
A fair question about what no-fix-no-fee means when a job requires buying and fitting components first.
An organisational recovery where procurement needs a document. Why that changes the paperwork and not the drive work.
A clicking drive its owner opened to inspect, finding a mark on the platter. An honest answer about what that means.
A working drive whose power socket has broken, and an owner asking whether he needs a repairer or a recovery lab.
Footage formatted before backup on a production, discovered days later, with every card since reused. An honest answer.
A card holding photographs required as evidence, where how it is handled matters as much as whether it can be read.
A wet laptop, a crashed phone, and an owner locked out of everything that needs a second factor. Case 1,800.
A drive returned after repeated invasive attempts nobody sought permission for, with a small proportion recovered.
A customer who thought ahead about the returned media, and did not want his new machine trying to start from it.
Two drives submitted together — one visibly corroded and scorched, one audibly touching its own surfaces. Appearances mislead.
A laptop refusing a known-good password after a system update, with local files and a reset the owner is right to refuse.
A repair that succeeded at exactly what was asked of it, after which the drive began clicking. Case 1,850.
Post or drop in your device for a free diagnostic, with a note on what happened — an engineer reviews it and confirms your exact quote in writing before any work begins.
First step: get the device onto our Belfast bench. Wrap it well, tuck your contact details in the box, and post it over — the diagnostic costs nothing, and you’ll have a firm written price to approve before we touch a single sector.
Posting it? A tracked, insured service is best. Dropping it off instead? You’re welcome Monday–Friday, 9am–5:30pm — please still pack the device as above.
Not ready to send anything yet? Use the form to describe the fault in your own words and one of the engineers will come back with a quote tailored to your situation.
We will get back to you soon. If it is urgent, call 028 9002 0144.