Devices · the drive that lives in a bag
Take the lid off an external and you find a bare hard disk with a small USB bridge board sitting between it and the socket. Bridges die by themselves, in Hull as anywhere. On most models they also keep the encryption keys. Add the knocks a drive takes in a rucksack and there are two faults to separate before any recovery starts.
An engineer will take the details
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| What you see | What the fault is | What to try |
|---|---|---|
| The disk in drive X: is not formatted. Do you want to format it now? | A cable came out mid-write and left the volume RAW; the data underneath is fine | Do not press Format |
| USB device not recognized, and Windows cannot identify the device | It never announces itself — bridge or disk | Swap the cable once, then stop |
| Device Manager shows Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) | The drive gives Windows no identity at all | A bridge failure — bench work |
| Data error (cyclic redundancy check), drive inaccessible | Bad sectors on the disk behind the bridge | Pull it out and stop |
| Disk Management reports RAW, or Not Initialized | The partition table will not parse, so Windows suggests wiping the disk | Say no. Initialising ends the job. |
| Windows reports that one of the attached USB devices has malfunctioned | A dead 5V line in the housing, or the bridge itself | Boards give out well before platters do |
Each item that arrives gets a case number the day it lands. An engineer looks at it and finds the real fault, and that costs you nothing. You are told in plain terms which files can come off the drive and which cannot. A price follows — one figure, written down. No work starts until you have seen it and agreed to it.
The first question is always the same: is it the enclosure, or is it the disk? Plenty of externals arrive with nothing at all happening — LaCie and Iomega are the usual offenders — and the disk behind the dead board turns out to be fine.
Nobody turns this feature on. It ships turned on. What matters is where the encryption is done — in the enclosure, or on the disk itself. On most portables it is the bridge, so the keys sit on that board and never touch the platters. Get them off and sectors that read as noise turn back into folders.
Before anything else a hardware imager takes a sector-by-sector copy. The rebuild runs on that copy and never on your drive. What we get out goes home on new media, and we pay the return post.
You are not billed while you are still thinking. The list of what came off the drive goes to you first, and the invoice waits on your word. Files go home on media bought in for the job, with the postage back on us. We keep the job open until you have opened them on your own machine.
One to know about: through 2023, owners of the SanDisk Extreme portable SSDs in 2TB and 4TB sizes found files disappearing without warning. A class action was filed against Western Digital in the US; a firmware update released during the case did not settle it. If you have one and it is behaving oddly, get it imaged now.
It started ticking nine days before the hand-in. A donor head stack went in, and the imaging was run slow on purpose. The keys came off the bridge board, because a Passport keeps them there. Chapters, references, the lot came back. The thesis went home with a week to spare.
No. Post the lot exactly as it is, however bad the outside looks. On most portables the USB board — not the disk — does the encrypting, so a healthy disk that arrives on its own reads as nothing but noise.
No. That prompt says one thing only: Windows does not recognise the file system. It says nothing whatever about your files. Click yes and you write over the very structures we would rebuild from.
A van ride is hard on a drive: hours of vibration, some rough handling and a temperature swing at the end of it. A disk that was already near the end often refuses the first spin-up afterwards. It reaches us most weeks.
Nearly always. The plastic it arrived in interests us very little. Three things count: the condition of the disk, the condition of its own PCB, and whether the bridge chip has enough left in it to hand over the keys.
Leave it switched off. A failing drive has a limited number of starts in it, and each one spends a little more. The free diagnosis will say which files can be read.