A recruitment consultancy in Leamington Spa had a jug of water go over a desktop machine on a Friday afternoon. Their IT contractor took it away for the weekend, dried it, cleaned what he could reach and tried a great many things, and by Monday had concluded that the disk itself needed a laboratory. He said so plainly, which saved everybody a week. Live vacancies, candidate files and a fortnight of unsent invoices were on the machine and the directors needed them before month end.
| Media | A desktop machine that took a substantial spill and could not be brought back by an IT contractor over a weekend. The contractor's own view was that the disk needed laboratory work. It holds a consultancy's candidate files and invoicing. |
| What was reported | Desktop machine, a jug of water spilled into it, an IT contractor attempted a hardware fix and recovery across a weekend without success, the contractor advising that a recovery laboratory was needed, urgent candidate and invoicing files on the disk. |
| Fault class | Liquid damage to the electronics. Water that has reached a circuit and dried leaves residue that keeps working on the metal afterwards, so tracks corrode and joints go high-resistance days later. The disk could not be read as it was, while the recording surfaces themselves had taken nothing at all. |
| On the bench | Not powered while any residue remained, because putting current through a corroded board is how a recoverable disk becomes a dead one. The board cleaned by approved methods, using ultrasonic cleaning and isopropyl, then dried and examined under a stereo microscope with the corroded joints reworked and two lifted pads rebuilt. Brought up on a current-limited bench supply and read behind a hardware write blocker, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, and the candidate files and invoicing parsed out in R-Studio and opened before release. |
The contractor did the right thing twice, and the second time was the important one. He dried the machine rather than switching it on, and then he stopped and said the job was past him. Knowing where your work ends is worth a great deal in this trade, and a machine handed over unpowered and unmolested is a far better starting point than one that has been through six attempts at booting.
Drying is not the same as cleaning, and the difference matters. Water evaporates and leaves behind whatever it was carrying, plus whatever it dissolved on the way. That residue is conductive and mildly corrosive, and it keeps attacking joints for days. A board that looks bone dry can be quietly eating itself, which is why cleaning has to be a deliberate step rather than something time takes care of.
Power is the thing that turns damage into destruction. Current through a board with residue on it drives corrosion far faster and can bridge connections that were merely damp into shorts that take components with them. Every attempt to see whether it works today reduces what can be done tomorrow. This is the one fault where doing nothing for a week is genuinely better than doing something on the first evening.
The recording surfaces are sealed away from all of it. A hard disk is a closed unit with a filtered breather, and a spill onto a desktop machine reaches the outside of that unit rather than the platters inside it. Once the board has been cleaned and the connections restored, the disk usually reads exactly as it always did. The consultancy's files were never wet.
Nothing was powered. Under magnification the board showed the tidemark of a spill across one corner, with green corrosion at four joints and two pads lifted where a track had gone. The disk had never been switched on since the water, which is the single most useful fact in a job like this and was entirely down to the contractor.
The board was cleaned by approved methods, ultrasonic and isopropyl, then dried and inspected again before anything else happened. Four joints were reworked and two pads rebuilt under a stereo microscope. The drive was brought up on a current-limited supply so the first power-on could be watched as a trace, and it spun and identified itself correctly. Imaging ran behind a hardware write blocker on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA in one pass, and R-Studio pulled out the candidate database and the invoicing folder.
The candidate files, the live vacancies and the unsent invoices all came back, along with the mail store, which nobody had thought to ask about and which turned out to matter more than the invoices did. The consultancy had everything two working days after the disk arrived and got the invoices out before month end.
One disk is £300 + VAT. Cleaning and reworking a board is electronics under the published exclusion, so 50% of the figure was settled upfront and the balance once the directors had opened the files.
Cut the power at the wall immediately and do not turn it back on to see how bad it is, because that check is what causes most of the permanent damage. Take the battery out if there is one. Then leave it alone: not on a radiator, not with a hairdryer, both of which drive moisture further in and can warp things. Do not put it in rice, which does very little and adds dust. If a technician has already dried it and got nowhere, that is a reasonable place to stop, and you should ask whether the machine was powered at any point afterwards, because that changes what the bench expects to find. For recovery the machine is not needed at all, only the disk out of it, so take it out and send the bare unit. Say how long ago the spill happened and what the liquid was, since sugary drinks and salt water leave much more aggressive residue than plain water does.
What this job cost, and on what terms. This one was charged at £300 + VAT, the figure agreed in writing before any work began. Paying for a job like this one. This file sits in the half the guarantee does not reach. Four sorts of work are excluded from no fix, no fee and there are no others: DVR jobs, forensic jobs, chip-level work, and electronic or mechanical failure. On any of them half the quoted figure is settled before the bench starts, with the remainder due when the files go back. Everything outside those four — a deletion, a formatted card, a broken file system, a lost partition, and firmware or service-area repair, which counts as logical however it sounds — runs under no fix, no fee, so an attempt that fails costs nothing.
If yours is doing the same thing. This drive was read at Oxford Data Recovery on the Oxford Science Park, about fifty-five miles down the M40. Post it tracked and insured, send it by a courier you book yourself, or bring it to the Oxford reception during Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm — there is no collection service and no counter in Coventry. The free look at it takes two working days from booking in and produces one written figure that then holds.
Freephone 0800 689 0668 to talk it through first. The shipping form and what goes in the parcel are on the contact page, and every band is published in full — including which work sits outside no fix, no fee.
These are real enquiries, from households and from businesses in Coventry and out across Warwickshire — Nuneaton and Bedworth, Rugby, Leamington Spa, Warwick, Kenilworth, Solihull, Stratford-upon-Avon, Atherstone and Southam. Names are gone: the customer, the company, the job title, anything at all that would point back at a person. What stays is the reasoning — what turned up, where the fault genuinely sat, which approach it demanded, and which machine on the bench did the work. One of the thirty-six was refused, and it earns a place here as squarely as any of the rest.
A confirmed mechanical diagnosis is a starting point, not a verdict
The component that failed spectacularly and the component holding the photographs are not the same one
Scoring removes the magnetic layer, so the honest question is how much of the surface it missed
A machine that has taken a spill? Ring 0800 689 0668 and leave it switched off. One disk is £300 + VAT with a free assessment.