An independent estate agent in Solihull rang about two external drives that had failed within a month of each other, which sounds like bad luck and was. On the first, the socket had been pushed back inside the casing and nothing would plug into it, though the drive had been working perfectly the day before that happened. The second simply refused to load, with Windows announcing that it was corrupted. Between them they held the property photography and floor plans for eleven years of listings. He asked whether the results could go onto a drive he would send in himself.
| Media | Two external drives with unrelated faults. On the first the USB socket has been driven back inside the enclosure so no cable will engage. The second mounts and is reported by Windows as corrupted. Both carry an estate agent's photography and plans. |
| What was reported | Two external drives, one with the socket pushed inside the casing and no way to connect it though it worked until then, one that will not load and is reported corrupted by Windows, eleven years of property photography and floor plans, output wanted on a drive the customer supplies. |
| Fault class | Two separate and equally ordinary faults. The first was damage to the enclosure rather than to the disk, so the answer was to reach the disk another way. The second was filesystem damage from an interrupted write, with the files themselves in place and only the structures describing them inconsistent. |
| On the bench | Both disks read behind a hardware write blocker so nothing could be altered on either. The first was taken out of its enclosure and connected directly, which sidestepped the ruined socket without any repair being attempted. The second was imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA and its filesystem structures rebuilt from the image in R-Studio, with directory records reconstructed where they had been left half written. Both sets were validated by opening a sample from every year and then written to the drive the customer supplied. |
A crushed socket is a problem with the box, not with the storage. Inside almost every desktop external drive is an ordinary disk with an ordinary connector on it, joined to a small bridge board that provides the USB port. If the port is destroyed, the disk is still a disk. It comes out of the plastic and goes onto a bench connection, and nothing about the data has changed in the process.
That is also why no soldering was needed or wanted. Rebuilding a socket well enough to trust would take longer than reading the disk and would leave the firm with an enclosure that might fail again. The point of the job was eleven years of photographs, not a repaired case, and reaching them through the disk's own connector is both faster and safer.
Corrupted, in the message Windows shows, is a claim about the index. A volume that will not load has usually been unplugged during a write, or has lost power at the wrong moment, and the structures that list the files no longer agree with each other. The photographs are exactly where they were. What has been damaged is the table of contents, and a table of contents can be rebuilt from a copy.
The dangerous instinct on the second drive was to let Windows fix it. The offer to scan and repair is well meant and it works on a drive whose only problem is a stale entry. On a drive with real structural damage it can move fragments into a recovery folder and rename them, which converts a rebuildable filesystem into a pile of numbered pieces. He had ignored the prompt twice, which is why this ended tidily.
The first enclosure came apart in a few minutes and the disk inside proved to be in good health, spinning up cleanly and profiling with no reallocated sectors worth mentioning. Read behind a write blocker it mounted immediately and copied at full speed. There was no fault in it at all, which is a satisfying and fairly common outcome once a wrecked port is out of the way.
The second disk was imaged first and touched afterwards only through the image. R-Studio found the primary structures damaged and the backup copy intact, and rebuilt the directory tree from a combination of the two, following each file's own fragment list rather than guessing at lengths. A folder from every year of listings was opened as pictures before anything was written out, and both sets went onto the customer's own drive with a folder for each source.
Everything came back off both units. The photography, the floor plans and a set of scanned title documents nobody had realised were on the second drive all read out clean, and the whole lot went onto the disk he supplied, arranged so that the two sources stayed separate rather than merged into one heap.
Each disk is a job of its own at £300 + VAT, quoted as two figures rather than one. Neither needed the lid off and neither had anything lifted off a circuit, so no fix, no fee applied to both, and the invoice did not go out until he had opened a sample himself.
Do not go at it with pliers, and do not try to hold a cable at an angle that seems to work, because an intermittent connection during a copy is how you end up with the second fault in this case as well as the first. A displaced socket is damage to the enclosure and the disk behind it is very often untouched, so the job is to reach the disk rather than to mend the box. If you are comfortable opening the case yourself, the disk inside is a standard unit and can be read on any machine with the right connection, but if it is the only copy of anything then it is worth not experimenting. Send the whole unit rather than a partly dismantled one. If you want the results back on your own drive, say so at the start and send a blank one that is bigger than the source, because a recovery that does not fit is an awkward conversation at the end of a job.
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.
Enumerating and reading are two different jobs, and only one of them needs the platters to turn
Windows names the structure it could not read, not the file you were looking for
Whirring and a tone together describe a mechanism working hard and getting nowhere
A broken socket or a drive Windows calls corrupted? Ring 0800 689 0668. One disk is £300 + VAT and a logical fault carries no fix, no fee.