Soaked, damp or smoke-damaged
Pull a drive out of a flooded or burnt-out machine and it is usually the one component worth keeping. The recording surfaces sit behind a seal; water does not reach them and the heat rarely gets that far. The harm comes from a mains lead, an airing cupboard, or three days on a shelf while dissolved salts crystallise on the contacts. Leave it off, leave it wet, bag it, post it.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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| Symptoms | What is behind it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Not a flicker since it got wet | The electronics took the water. Behind the seal the platters will almost certainly still read fine | Seal it in a bag, still wet |
| The plug trips, or the power supply dies | A shorted board. Every go at it sends another surge into the head preamp | Do not try again |
| White or green powder on the pins | Corrosion with a head start, and still going | Every day costs |
| Came out of the fire still shut | The platters are shut inside alloy; the scorched board is a part you can buy | Carry it flat and keep it closed |
| Soot across the pins and the breather hole | Acidic grit. Let it spin once and it scratches its own platters | Leave the soot where it is |
| It went into salt water | Chloride eats the magnetic coating direct; there is no worse water to have | Bag it now, still wet |
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.
A wet drive stays wet in transit, sealed in a bag. Let it dry on the journey and every mineral the water was carrying is left sitting on the contacts. Fire jobs come in as found, soot included.
The residue comes off, the contact strip is taken back to bare metal, and a matched donor board is fitted with the ROM chip desoldered from your own and moved over.
Cleaning only pauses the corrosion, so imaging starts the same day rather than the next one. Once a full sector-by-sector copy exists, the original is put aside.
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.
Two things decide most of these jobs: whether anybody pressed the power button, and how many days passed before the drive was posted. Both are settled long before it reaches a bench. Little of this work is dramatic. A £2.7m scheme has protected over 200 properties along the Rea at Selly Park since 2018, but the drives that arrive here have usually met a burst pipe, a washing machine that emptied itself or a flat roof after a storm — and they come back as ordinary jobs, provided nobody dried them or tested them first.
Nobody tried to dry it out or test it, and that decision is the whole case. It went into a sealed bag still wet and into the post that afternoon. Contacts were cleaned at the bench, a donor board took the ROM off the original, and a full image followed inside the week. Twenty years of family pictures came back.
Usually there is, on two conditions: nobody powered it up wet, and it gets to the lab quickly. What a soaking kills is the circuit board rather than the recording surfaces, and a board can be replaced.
No. The water that matters is inside a sealed casing where rice cannot go. What the bag does add is starch dust and grit around the connector, and the corrosion runs on for every day the drive sits in it.
Often, yes. The platters are shut inside an alloy casing and burnt electronics are replaceable parts. What genuinely finishes a case is metal warped by the heat, or soot that has found its way in through the breather filter. Send it exactly as it came out of the building: shut, unwashed, unplugged.
No, and we know that sits badly. Everything the water dissolved stays behind when it evaporates, crystallising over the contacts and into every gap it was sitting in. Bag it wet and keep it wet until it reaches the bench.
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.