A retired miner in Bedworth has spent six years writing an account of the pits he worked, based on his own notes and interviews with men he trained with. It lived in one document on the desktop of an ageing tower. When the machine began misbehaving he decided to reinstall Windows, got as far as the copying stage, remembered the manuscript, and pulled the plug out of the wall. He then did the best thing anyone in that position can do, which is nothing at all. The disk came out of the machine and stayed out.
| Media | A SATA disk from a desktop machine on which a Windows installation was begun without a backup and interrupted part way through the copying stage. The owner wants one document of well under a megabyte. |
| What was reported | SATA disk, a Windows reinstall started with no backup taken, stopped part way through by switching the machine off at the wall, one document of under a megabyte wanted, the disk removed and not used since. |
| Fault class | Partial overwriting. An installation writes over the front of the disk and then works forward, so everything it reached is genuinely gone and everything beyond it is untouched. Whether the manuscript survived was a question of where on the disk it had been sitting, which is settled by reading rather than by guessing. |
| On the bench | Read behind a hardware write blocker so no further writing of any kind could occur. Imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA in one pass. The image was examined in R-Studio for surviving filesystem structures from the previous installation, and the document was located by searching the untouched region for its content signature once the old records were found to have been overwritten. The recovered file was opened, checked against a printed page the owner still had, and written to fresh media. |
Stopping halfway is the difference between this being possible and not. An installer does not scatter itself across a disk. It writes a new partition structure at the front and then lays its files down in order, working outwards. Interrupt it and you have a clean boundary: everything below is gone and everything above is exactly as it was. The only question is which side of that line your document was on.
Pulling the plug was the right call, even though it feels reckless. Letting the installation finish would have written considerably more, and cancelling it politely would have let it continue writing while it tidied up. Cutting the power stops it instantly. It is not good for a filesystem and it was the correct decision here, because a filesystem can be rebuilt and an overwritten manuscript cannot.
A small file is both the easiest and the hardest thing to find. A document under a megabyte occupies a handful of blocks, so if the installer reached them there is nothing to recover and no partial version to offer. On the other hand it will not be fragmented across the disk, so if it survived it survived whole. There is very little middle ground with files this size and no point pretending otherwise before the disk has been read.
What cannot be recovered is worth stating alongside what can. Overwritten is a permanent condition. There is no residual magnetism to read back on a modern drive, whatever you may have been told, and a laboratory that suggests otherwise is selling something. Everything that follows in this job depended on the installer not having got that far, and if it had, the honest answer would have been given at the end of the free assessment.
The disk profiled healthy, which was expected since nothing mechanical had happened to it. Imaged behind a write blocker in a single pass, it gave a clean read across the whole capacity, and the boundary the installation had left was visible in the image as an abrupt change from fresh installer files to the remains of the previous system.
The old filesystem records had been overwritten along with the front of the disk, so the tree could not simply be reopened. R-Studio was used to search the untouched region for the document's content, working from the format's own signature and from a phrase the owner supplied from a printed page he still had. It was found intact, well beyond the boundary, along with a folder of earlier drafts and the scanned photographs he had assumed were gone with everything else.
The manuscript came back whole and so did four earlier drafts and around two hundred scanned photographs. He was shown the boundary on a diagram so he could see why some things survived and others had not, and given the list of what had been in the overwritten region so he knew what to stop looking for.
One disk is £300 + VAT. This was reading rather than repairing, with the lid on and nothing lifted off a circuit, so no fix, no fee applied and the invoice did not go out until he had read his own first chapter off the new media.
Switch the machine off at the wall the moment you realise, rather than cancelling and letting it tidy up after itself. Then leave it off. Every subsequent boot writes logs, indexes and temporary files, and on a disk where your document is sitting in unallocated space that is a slow way of destroying it. Do not restart the installation to get to a desktop from which you can run recovery software, and do not install that software onto the disk you are trying to recover, which is the most common way these jobs are lost after the fact. If you are able to take the disk out and put it aside, do. Note down anything you can remember about the file: a title, a phrase from inside it, roughly when it was last saved. Any of those makes it findable in a region where the filesystem records no longer exist.
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. Nothing here called for the disk to be opened, a board rebuilt or a chip lifted off, which puts the work on the logical side of the line and under no fix, no fee. Files back, invoice follows; nothing back, nothing owed, and the media goes home either way. Four sorts of work sit outside that promise and only those four: DVR jobs, forensic jobs, chip-level work, and electronic or mechanical failure. The rest keep it, firmware and service-area repair included — both are logical jobs whatever their reputation suggests.
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.
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Stopped an installation and lost a file? Ring 0800 689 0668 and leave the machine switched off. One disk is £300 + VAT with a free assessment.