Devices · drives that live in a bag
Inside the case sits a hard disk and, between it and the socket, a small USB bridge board. That board fails in its own right, and on most drives it also holds the encryption keys. Add the knocks a rucksack delivers between Birmingham and the bench and there are two separate faults to disentangle, neither of them a job for guesswork.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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| What you see | What is behind it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| You need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it | A cable yanked mid-write turned the volume RAW; underneath, the files are fine | Never press Format |
| USB device not recognized — the device you plugged in malfunctioned | Nothing enumerates — the board or the disk | Swap the cable once, then stop |
| Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) — error Code 43 | Windows never gets an identity out of it | Bridge board fault — bench job |
| Data error (cyclic redundancy check) — drive not accessible | Sectors failing on the disk inside the case | Pull it out and stop |
| Disk Management reports RAW, or Not Initialized | Windows cannot read the partition table and offers to wipe it | Say no; initialising kills it |
| Windows reports a USB device attached to this PC has malfunctioned | The caddy's 5V rail or its bridge has died | Electronics give up far sooner than platters do |
Every item gets a case number of its own the day it lands. An engineer then works out what has actually failed and tells you plainly which files have a real chance of coming back and which do not. Only then does a price follow: one figure, fixed, in writing, and it costs you nothing to see it. Nothing is charged until you say yes.
Everything starts with one question: was it the box or the drive? Plenty of externals that arrive stone dead — LaCie and Iomega cases especially — have a sound disk sitting behind burnt-out electronics.
Nobody chooses this; it is on already. What matters is which side of the cable does the encrypting. On most externals that is the bridge, so the keys sit with the board and never touch the disk. Lift them off and unreadable sectors turn back into folders.
A hardware imager takes a sector-level copy first. Your folders are rebuilt from that copy alone, and the result goes home on fresh media, posted at our cost.
No invoice is raised until the full list of recovered files has sat in front of you and you have said go ahead. Your data comes back on media we buy new, posted at our expense, and the job is not closed here until every file has opened on your own machine.
One to know about: across 2023 the 2TB and 4TB SanDisk Extreme portables started shedding files with no warning whatever. Buyers took Western Digital to court in the US as a class, and a firmware release issued while that case was live did not settle it. If yours is one of these and playing up, get an image taken now.
The drive began ticking nine days before the hand-in date. A donor head stack went in, the imaging was held deliberately slow, and the encryption keys came off the bridge board; the thesis came home whole, references and all, a week ahead of the deadline.
No. Send the lot, however wrecked the shell looks. On a great many externals the encryption is done by the USB board rather than by the disk, and a perfectly sound disk without that board reads as pure noise.
No, never. All that box is telling you is that Windows cannot read the file system; it knows nothing about your files. Click it and you flatten the very structures a rebuild needs.
Transit is rough treatment — shaking, hard handling and a swing in temperature, all in the same trip. A disk that was already close to the end will very often quit the first time it spins up afterwards. It happens here most weeks.
Nearly always. The plastic around it is worth very little to us. What counts is how the disk itself is, what shape its own board is in, and whether the bridge chip has enough life left to hand over its keys.
Every extra power-up takes something off a drive that is already going. Leave it switched off and let the free diagnosis say what still reads.