A lorry driver from Southam, tramping out of one of the distribution parks on the edge of Coventry, kept an old Toshiba in the cab and charged it overnight in the bunk. The battery swelled, vented and set fire to the seat cover. The machine went away for examination afterwards and came back to him as a bag of parts, the hard disk on its own in an envelope with a note saying it appeared undamaged. What he wanted was the photographs, eleven years of two children growing up, and what he wanted to know first was whether the fire had got into the disk.
| Media | A hard disk out of a Toshiba laptop whose battery overheated and vented, handed back to the owner on its own after the machine had been examined and the disk described as undamaged. Photographs are the main thing wanted from it. |
| What was reported | Toshiba laptop, battery swelled and vented while charging overnight, machine written off and taken away for examination, hard disk returned separately with a note calling it undamaged, photographs of the owner's children the priority, the owner asking whether heat had reached the disk. |
| Fault class | No fault in the disk at all. The event destroyed the cell, the shell around it and everything on that side of the machine, while the disk is a sealed assembly bolted elsewhere and had come through it. That was established rather than assumed, because a disk somebody else has called undamaged is still a disk nobody has read. |
| On the bench | Examined under a stereo microscope before it was given any power, with the casing, the label, the connector and the underside checked for discolouration, distorted plastic and run flux. Brought up on a current-limited bench supply so the first start could be watched as a trace rather than gambled on. Read behind a hardware write blocker, with its own logs read on PC-3000 UDMA for any record of high temperatures or reallocation. Imaged on DeepSpar in one pass, and the photographs rendered as thumbnails in R-Studio and looked at before they went to fresh media. |
A laptop is several unrelated things bolted into one shell. The cell that vented, the logic it was feeding and the disk in its bay are separate assemblies, and the destruction of one says very little about the others. That is why a machine can be beyond any argument while the component holding the photographs sits in the wreckage in perfect order. It is also why the recovery had nothing to do with repairing the laptop, which was never going to work again and did not need to.
Heat is the one thing that could have crossed over, and heat leaves a record. Platters and the lubricant on them do not enjoy high temperatures, and a fire inside the same shell is close enough to be worth taking seriously, so the real question was not whether the disk is a separate part but how warm this one had become. Browned labels, distorted plastic, run flux and discoloured metal all say something, and the drive keeps its own account of the temperatures it has seen. None of it pointed anywhere alarming.
Somebody else calling it sound is a starting point rather than a finding. Whoever went through the machine was examining a fire, not assessing storage, and had no reason to read the disk. Checking it properly took twenty minutes and came before any promise was made, which is the sequence that protects the customer. Storage that arrives burnt is physical work under the published terms, with half the figure due before the bench starts. This one had not arrived burnt, and the inspection is what established the difference; had it gone the other way he would have been told before anything began rather than afterwards.
What could not be taken in was the laptop. A vented lithium cell is not something to put in the post, no carrier will knowingly take one and nobody wants it arriving on a bench. The useful part is that it is never needed. For a laptop, a PC or a Mac the disk comes out and travels on its own, and in this case somebody had already done that for him. The same holds for a machine that is simply dead. Send the storage, not the wreck it came out of.
Under magnification the caddy carried soot on its underside and one screw had lost its finish, while the drive's own casing was unmarked, the label was still its original colour and no solder had run anywhere on the board. Nothing suggested it had been near enough to the fire to matter. It was still not powered until all that had been looked at, because a drive that has been cooked can be finished off by one careless start.
On a current-limited supply the start followed the ordinary curve, the disk reached speed and identified itself. Its logs held no over-temperature event, a reallocation count in single figures and no growth in it over the last hundred hours of use. Imaging on DeepSpar ran in one pass with no weak regions and no retries worth reporting, and R-Studio pulled the picture folders out of the image and rendered every one as a thumbnail, so that a damaged file would be seen rather than counted.
Everything came back, which he had to be told twice before he believed it. Eleven years of photographs and the video clips among them, the scanned paperwork, and the training certificates he had assumed he was going to have to sit again. The disk was sound, so it went home in a caddy alongside the copies rather than being kept, and he now has the pictures in two places for the first time.
One disk is £300 + VAT. Nothing was opened, no part was fitted and the work was reading a healthy disk, so no fix, no fee applied and the invoice followed once he had been through the pictures.
Get the power off it and leave it off. Do not charge it, do not try it once more to see what happens, and do not put a swollen battery back into service, because a cell that has vented once will do it again. Do not post the machine: a damaged lithium battery is a dangerous goods problem, carriers refuse it when they know, and the laptop is not needed for a recovery in any case. Take the disk out, or ask whoever is holding the machine to hand the disk over separately, which is worth asking early if an insurer or a manufacturer has taken it away, since they want the machine and have no use for the storage in it. Keep the disk out of soot and damp while it waits, and send it in an anti-static bag inside a rigid box. Say how close the fire came, how hot that area got and whether anybody has powered the disk since, because a drive that has been run hot is handled differently from one that was merely nearby. If the storage in the machine is soldered to the mainboard rather than a separate disk, it cannot be lifted out and cannot be helped.
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.
A confirmed mechanical diagnosis is a starting point, not a verdict
Liquid attacks the connections long after it has dried, which is why powering it up is the wrong first move
Scoring removes the magnetic layer, so the honest question is how much of the surface it missed
A machine lost to a battery fire? Ring 0800 689 0668 and send the disk on its own, never the laptop. One disk is £300 + VAT and the examination costs nothing.