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NDR / Claims, court and footage / The disk out of a recorder

Evidence work · the disk inside a CCTV recorder

DVR hard drive recovery, Nottingham. The drive is finished; what it holds usually is not.

Mains off. Drive out. Drive into the post, recorder left where it stands, anywhere in Nottingham. Boot loops. Black panels. A menu insisting no disk is fitted. Live pictures with no playback behind them. The hard drive is what causes nearly all of that, and not the recorder. A disk in a CCTV box is written to for every second the box has power, and it is generally the cheapest part anybody put in there. Each hour you leave the unit going, the loop turns again and spends more of the footage you rang about. Diagnosis costs nothing. The work is £400 + VAT, half of that up front when a drive must be opened.

On most jobs, nothing to pay if no files come back Treated as an exhibit from the moment it lands Every hour, the loop writes over more of it

An engineer will talk it through, in confidence
0115 8220606

What really goes wrong inside.

What kind of disk it isSurveillance drives are built for continuous writing: Seagate's SkyHawk range and Western Digital's Purple. Beside the cameras they cost next to nothing, and it is the endless writing that finishes them.
What shows on the screenBoot loops. A panel that stays black. A menu insisting no disk is fitted. Live pictures perfectly fine while playback does nothing at all, or gives up a few seconds into the same hour on every attempt.
Why a computer finds nothingFew recorders write a filesystem any computer recognises, and a number use the bare device. Connect that disk to a Windows machine and what you get is an empty-looking disk and an offer to format it. The position is better than it appears. Say no.
What cannot be recoveredFootage already written over. Encrypted files that arrive without their password file. Anything inside a band the drive will not read at all. If that is what it comes to, we tell you early, and most jobs carry no charge where the data does not come back.

What the symptom points to.

Something else? Say what it does →
What is happeningWhat usually causes itWhat that means for you
It reboots over and overIt is stuck waiting for a disk that never answersMains lead out, now
No hard disk, according to the menuEither the disk has gone off the bus or its heads haveRefuse any reformat offer and take it out
Live pictures fine, playback deadVideo is fine. The damage is to the index that points at itSend the drive in
A click, or a slow buzz, from inside the boxHeads down on the surface. Each switch-on takes more awayKeep it powered down
A PC calls the disk unformattedNo PC understands the layout a recorder writesOrdinary. Turn down the format prompt
The installer has fitted a new disk alreadyThe original disk is the evidence, wherever it has got toAsk for it back untouched, then post it
Getting it here: tracked, insured post to the intake lab, and the return leg is at our cost. Unsure what belongs in the box? Ring before it is taped up, and an engineer will run through what to include and what to keep at home. The rest of it is set out on the packing and postage guide.

The order we work in.

More jobs like this one →
01

Booked in the day it arrives, and the first look is on us Free

Your device picks up a case number the day it arrives, and an engineer then establishes what has genuinely gone wrong — at no cost, and ahead of everything else. Two things come back to you together: a plain account of what can be lifted and what cannot, and one fixed figure in writing. Agree to that figure, or turn it down and pay nothing.

The first look is freeOne fixed figure, in writingNo charge at this point
02

Stop it where it stands

Mains off, drive out, and no computer anywhere near it. Where a disk will not answer at all, the bench finds the fault before anything else happens — heads, motor, board, or the firmware area on the drive itself — and only then does anybody try to read it.

No further writing to itRead-only copy taken
03

Repair as far as the image, no further

Repair stops at the point where an image becomes possible. A write blocker then goes on and the copy comes off read-only, weak ground worked in short passes rather than forced. Because everything afterwards happens on the copy, the original gets handled once.

Board, motor, headsRead back in short passes
04

Then lift the video out

Clips come out in sequence where the recorder's layout survived into the image, each carrying a channel and a recording time. Where it did not, the video comes instead from combing the image for the fixed byte pattern every compressed frame begins with, and it plays without labels.

Layout taken off the copyCarved out where none survives
05

The file list comes before the bill

The file list reaches you before any invoice does. Say yes and it is billed; say no and it is not — and on most jobs, if nothing comes back there is nothing to pay. Whatever comes off goes home on media bought in for your case, carriage at our end. Nothing here is closed until you have opened those files on your own machine.

Nothing is charged until you agree the figureNew media, bought in for your jobWe pay to send it home

What turns up on recorder disks

  • Nothing about this duty is gentle — a surveillance drive writes for the whole of its working life, and it is usually the cheapest component in the box. Constant writing is what finishes them.
  • A PC will report it empty — recorders write layouts of their own, and some go straight to the bare device, so Windows recognises nothing and proposes a format. Refuse it. Everything is still underneath.
  • The copy is what gets worked on — on goes a write blocker, off comes the image, and only then does anybody open a file. One careful pass, not fifty, because on a failing disk any pass may be the last one.
  • Three things, and only three, set the limit. The loop got to your hour first. There is one region the disk will not read, and your hour is in it. Or the recorder was left running for another week. Skill has nothing to do with any of the three, and you are told which applies before money changes hands.

Post the drive, keep the box: a recorder is heavy, suffers in transit, and is of no use on this bench. Pull the disk, write down which bay it sat in, and send that one item, packed tightly enough that it cannot move. A multi-disk NVR is the exception — video is spread across the whole set, so every disk travels, in bay order. Telephone before you pack. We pay the return postage.

One of these, from start to finish.

NG · NTG-2026-2019ON THE LOG ✓

A gate recorder that failed at a Newark haulage yard

Nobody had chased up the night gate camera, whose playback had stopped working weeks earlier. Then a load went missing. There was one bad head on the drive. Repair went no further than an image demanded, and the surface came off a short pass at a time. Four channels of the eight returned, times intact. Across the middle of the platter ran a band that would not read at all, and whatever was in it has stayed there. A partial recovery, written up as one.

4 of 8 channels returned with their times intact72 hours of work on it

What helps, and what does damage.

Worth doing first

  • Take the power off it first
  • Make, model, and the date that matters — write them down
  • Send the drive; keep the recorder on site
  • Name the owner, and whoever can authorise us to start

What makes it harder

  • Leaving it powered in the hope it recovers
  • Agreeing to a reformat so the box boots
  • Slipping the disk into a PC to have a look
  • Letting a replacement go in while the original leaves site

What gets asked before posting.

There is no hard disk, says the menu. Has the video gone with it?

That message proves nothing of the sort. It says the recorder can no longer see its disk, and no more than that. Your video is down on the platters where it has always been. Get the mains lead out first, though: an hour of writing by a disk that is already failing costs you something every time.

Windows wants to format the drive. Have I done damage?

No, but turn the offer down. A recorder writes a layout Windows was never built to read, so a disk stuffed with video looks empty on a PC. Decline, unplug, and say so when you book in if a format has already been run, because that alters where the search starts.

Should I send the recorder too?

Just the drive. Recorders are heavy things, they take a beating in the post, and nothing on this bench has any use for one. The exception is a multi-disk NVR, where video is spread over the whole set: telephone before packing and we will tell you what to include.

Should the installer just fit a new disk?

Only where the old one leaves for good. Any recorder it goes back into will start writing over it again. Ask to have it handed over unpowered, in an anti-static bag, then keep it somewhere safe while you make your mind up about what it holds.

Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.

What the recorder still holds → Copies insurers and police accept → What survives a deletion → Jobs that end up in court →

Power the recorder down before the loop reaches your clip.

Cut the power to the DVR before anything else — while it runs it keeps writing, and the oldest footage goes first. Then post it in. The first look is free, CCTV and DVR work is £400 + VAT quoted in writing before anything starts, and what is on that disk goes no further than the bench.

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