Wet, sooty, or both at once
Post it damp today from anywhere in Nottingham, leave the power alone, and seal the bag before it dries. Anything the water or the soot actually got to — connector, contact strip, the board itself — is a part that can be cleaned, bought or exchanged. Behind all of them sits a sealed chamber with the platters inside, which liquid does not enter and which the heat of an ordinary house fire rarely troubles. What cannot be undone afterwards is somebody hopefully pressing power while the drive was still damp, or a drawer, a fortnight, and salts drying hard onto the pins. Nothing is charged for the assessment, one drive comes to £300 + VAT, the figure reaches you in writing before any chargeable work, and most jobs here are no-fee unless the files are recovered.
Ask an engineer, and the first look is free
0115 8220606
| What it looks like | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Dead since the water reached it | The board has gone. Sealed away from it, the platters normally read as they always did | Seal it in a bag while damp |
| It trips the socket, or it takes the power supply out with it | A shorted board, and every retry pushes another spike through to the head preamp | Go no further; leave it be |
| Crust, white or green, forming across the contacts | Corrosion is under way, and nothing stops it by itself | Post it now, not next week |
| Heat damage, casing still sound | The alloy body did its job. A dead board is a part we can buy | Leave it shut and keep it level |
| Soot driven into the pins and into the breather filter | Abrasive as well as acidic. One spin and the drive is grinding its own surfaces | Do not wipe the soot off |
| Salt water has been in it | Chloride goes past the board and into the coating itself. Nothing wet is worse | Damp into a bag, sealed, then posted |
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.
Damp is how we want it to turn up, and the bag opened here should still be wet when it is. Let it dry on the journey and everything the water was carrying crystallises onto the contacts instead. Heat and soot jobs travel a different way: untouched, soot and all.
Deposits come away and the contact strip goes back to bare metal. After that a donor board of the correct model is fitted, carrying the ROM chip lifted off your own.
Cleaning only buys time, since corrosion starts again. So the image comes off the same day, and with that full sector-by-sector copy in hand your drive goes on a shelf while everything else runs against the copy.
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.
Hardly any of this work is dramatic. A pipe splitting behind the kitchen units. A washing machine emptying its contents onto the floor at three in the morning. A storeroom radiator letting go over a closed weekend. A drive lifted out of a fire-damaged office and posted the same afternoon. Ordinary jobs, most of which go home as ordinary jobs. Whether yours does is decided before the parcel even arrives: did somebody reach for the power, and how many days sat between the damage and the postbox. Nothing on the bench fixes either.
Nobody powered it up to see whether it still worked, and nobody stood it near a radiator — which is why twenty years of family photographs are back with their owner. Bagged, still wet, it caught the post that same afternoon. Cleaning the pads and moving the ROM across to a donor board was the whole of it, and the full image finished on day four.
Most of the time, yes. A circuit board is what water finishes, and boards are stock parts. Where it hardly ever gets is inside the chamber holding the platters. Two things decide the job: that the power button went untouched while the drive was damp, and that it reached us quickly.
No, and it brings two fresh problems along with it. Fine grit and starch dust come off rice, and both work into the contacts. Meanwhile every day in the bowl is another day of corrosion, with the moisture that is doing the damage sealed away where no grain will ever reach it.
Often, yes. Platters are held in an alloy body, and cooked electronics are only parts to be swapped. What makes one of these awkward is a casing that has distorted, or soot that got past the breather filter. Send it just as you found it: sealed up, not cleaned, and with nobody having tried the power.
No, and yes, that runs against instinct. Everything the water was carrying is left behind as it evaporates, baked hard onto the contacts and into the seams of the casing. Bag it wet. It ought still to be wet when the bag is opened on the bench here.
The look costs nothing. What comes back to you is a file list — what opened, what did not — plus one figure to finish the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. Most jobs carry no fee at all unless the data comes back. Leave the drive switched off until you have that list.