Wet, sooty, or both at once
Get a quote, then post it damp today from anywhere in Nottingham, do not touch the on/off switch, and seal the bag before the drive dries. All the parts the water or soot could have damaged (the connector, the contact strip, the board itself) are cleanable, replaceable or repairable. Beneath those is a sealed chamber housing the platters, which liquid does not enter and which the heat of a typical house fire rarely troubles. What cannot be reversed after the fact is someone hopefully pressing the power button with the drive still wet, or the drive sitting in a drawer for a fortnight with salts drying hard onto the pins. There is no cost to assess, the price for one drive is £300 + VAT, you receive the figure in writing before any chargeable work, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data.
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 main board is destroyed. 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 each retry sends another voltage spike through to the head preamplifier | Go no further; leave it be |
| Crust, white or green, forming across the contacts | Corrosion is under way and carries on by itself | Get a quote and post it now, not next week |
| Heat damage, casing still sound | The alloy casing did its job. A dead board is a part we can buy | Leave it shut and keep it level |
| Soot particles driven into the pins and the breather filter | As abrasive as it is acidic. The first time the drive spins, it begins grinding its own surfaces | Do not wipe the soot off |
| Salt water has been in it | Water-borne chloride makes its way past the board and into the coating itself. Nothing wet is worse | Quote first, then bagged damp, sealed and posted |
Your case number is assigned when the item is received. Then an engineer works out what went wrong (no charge). At this point, you receive a basic summary of which parts are recoverable and which are not. You also receive a single written quote for the price of the recovery. Accept the quoted price or turn it down, and there is no obligation to pay anything.
Damp is how we want it to arrive, and the bag opened here should still be moist when it is. Let it dry in transit and everything the water was carrying crystallises onto the contacts instead. Heat and soot jobs travel a different way: untouched, soot and all.
All deposits come loose and the contact strip returns to clean metal. A donor board of the correct model is then installed, along with the ROM chip taken from your original.
Cleaning only gives us some extra time until corrosion begins again. So the image comes off the same day, and with that complete sector-by-sector copy in hand your drive can be put on a shelf while everything else runs against the copy.
A complete file list will be provided before any invoicing. Simply say "yes" or "no" to what we found: yes means it is billed, no means it is not, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. What we find is posted to you on media purchased specifically for your case, at no additional cost to you. We consider the process complete once you have opened those files yourself on your own computer.
Hardly any of this work is dramatic. Leaks behind kitchen units. A washing machine dumping its contents on the floor at three in the morning. A storeroom radiator leaking over a weekend when no one is around. A drive removed from a fire-damaged office and posted the same afternoon. Most jobs like these go home as ordinary jobs. Whether yours does is decided before the parcel even arrives, on two factors: did someone reach for the power, and how many days passed between the damage and the postbox? Nothing on the bench fixes either.
Nobody powered it up to see if it still worked, and no one left it near a radiator, which is why twenty years of family photos are back with their owner. Wet, bagged, it caught the post that same afternoon. Cleaning the pads and transferring the ROM to a donor board was the whole of the repair, and the full image finished on day four.
Most of the time, yes. Water destroys circuit boards, and boards are stock parts. The one place it rarely gets is the chamber housing the platters. Two things decide the job: that the power button was never pressed while the drive was wet, and that it reached us quickly.
No, and it brings two fresh problems with it. Rice produces grit and starch dust, and both work their way into the contacts. Meanwhile each extra day in the bowl increases corrosion, with the moisture doing the damage sealed away where no grain of rice will reach it.
Often, yes. The platters are held in an alloy body, and cooked electronics are simply parts to be swapped. What makes it difficult is a case that has warped, or soot that has got past the breather filter. Get a quote, then send it exactly as you found it: sealed in a bag, uncleaned, and without anyone trying the power.
No. And yes, this goes against instinct. As the water dries, everything it carried stays behind on the contacts and in the seams of the casing, baked into place. Bag it wet. When the bag is opened on the bench here, it should still be wet.
The look costs nothing. It gives you a file listing of what opened and what did not, along with the cost of finishing the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Do not switch the drive on until you have that listing.