Wet, sooty, or both
Inside the casing is a sealed chamber. Water does not get into it, and a house fire rarely gets hot enough to trouble it. Everything that does get wet or sooty is a part: the board, the connector, the contact strip. Parts can be cleaned or swapped. What cannot be undone is a power-up while the thing is damp, or a fortnight in a drawer with salts drying onto the pins. Off, wet, bagged, posted today from anywhere in Hull.
An engineer will take the details
0800 6890668
| The symptoms | What the fault is | What to try |
|---|---|---|
| Dead since it got wet | The board has gone. Sealed off behind it, the platters will normally read as they always did | Seal it in a bag, still wet |
| Trips the socket, or takes out the power supply | Shorted board. Every retry sends another spike at the head preamp | Leave it alone now |
| White or green crust on the contacts | Corrosion has started, and it will not stop on its own | Do not leave it standing |
| Heat damaged, casing still closed | The alloy body held. A damaged board is a part we can buy | Leave it shut. Carry it flat |
| Soot worked into the breather filter and the pins | Abrasive and acidic. One spin and it scratches its own surfaces | Leave the soot where it is |
| Salt water got to it | Chloride goes past the board for the magnetic coating. No water is worse | Bag it wet, seal it, post it |
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.
A bagged drive is still wet when we open it, and that is what we want. Dry it on the journey and whatever the water carried is left behind on the contacts as crystal. Fire jobs arrive as found, soot included.
The deposits come off. The contact strip is polished back to clean metal. A matched donor board goes on, with the ROM chip taken off your own board and moved onto it.
Cleaning buys time and nothing more; the corrosion picks up again. So we image it the same day. Once a full sector-by-sector copy exists, the drive goes on the shelf and we work from the copy.
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.
Most of these jobs turn on two things: whether anyone tried the power, and how long the drive waited before it was posted. Neither is decided at the bench. Both are done by the time we see it. Very little of this is dramatic work. Most of what arrives has nothing to do with the weather: a pipe split behind a kitchen unit, a washing machine that emptied itself in the night, a flat roof that gave up after a wet spell, a caravan park office where something let go over the winter. Ordinary jobs. They go back as ordinary jobs, so long as nobody dried the drive or plugged it in.
Nobody switched it on to see, and nobody tried to dry it out. That is what left something to work with. It went into the post the same afternoon, wet, sealed in a bag. At the bench the pads were cleaned up, the ROM lifted onto a donor board, and a complete image taken a few days later. Twenty years of family photographs went back.
Usually, yes, so long as two things went right: nobody powered it up while damp, and it reached the bench quickly. Water kills the circuit board. The recording surfaces sit sealed away from it, and a board is a replaceable part.
No. The water that matters is shut inside the casing, where rice cannot reach it. Rice brings problems of its own — starch dust, and grit sitting on the contacts. And the drive corrodes for every day it spends in the tub.
Often, yes. The alloy body holds the platters in, and heat-damaged electronics are parts we can replace. The bad ones are where metal has warped, or where soot has found its way past the breather filter. It should come to us just as it left the building — closed, not cleaned, not plugged in.
No. It goes against instinct, we know. Anything the water picked up stays behind when the water evaporates, hardening across the contacts and into every gap in the casing. Seal it damp. It should still be damp when an engineer cuts the bag open.
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.