A failed head took an office PC offline — donor heads and a staged image recovered the lot.
A Dell desktop that had begun throwing read errors and blue-screening, its system drive riddled with bad sectors.
Opened on the bench in our clean-air environment, the drive had a head down in the stack. A 3.5-inch desktop drive gives a little more room to work than a laptop drive, but a head crash is a head crash: the failed heads have to be replaced before the drive will read anything, and the exposed platters have to be kept clear of contamination the whole time.
We fitted a matched donor head set, paired to the drive so the new heads read the platters correctly, and imaged it on a DeepSpar Disk Imager. Working head by head and keeping the load light on a fragile drive, we captured each healthy surface in full before spending the drive's limited remaining life on the weakest areas. The PC3000 handled firmware access. Securing the strongest surfaces first is what gets the most important data off before anything can degrade further.
From the image we rebuilt the file system and checked the office's working files opened correctly before writing them to fresh media.
We imaged about 99% of the drive and returned all of the office's working files, six working days on. The practical lesson for any business is to make sure local machines sync to the server or a backup automatically — the files that hurt most to lose are usually the ones a member of staff was still working on locally.
DeepSpar DDI · PC3000 — imaging and recovery carried out in-house. Every job is imaged before any recovery work begins, and the original media is never written to.
Send us your device for a free diagnostic, and tell us a little about what happened — an engineer will review it and confirm your exact quote in writing before any work begins.
Getting your data back begins with getting the device to us. Pack it up safely, pop your contact details inside, and send it over — once we’ve run the free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work starts.
Posting it? A tracked, insured service is what we’d recommend. Rather drop it in? You’re welcome Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm — just package the device up as above first.
Want a bit more detail first? Fill in the form with more about your issue and an engineer will review it and send you a custom quote.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 0191 406 1051.
Yes — from failed drives recovered in our clean-air environment through to logical faults like a corrupt partition table rebuilt off an image. The original drive is never written to.
From £300 plus VAT, with no fix, no fee on most jobs and a fixed quote before any work starts.
Don't format it, and stop using the PC. The data is usually still intact; it's the formatting, or carrying on using the machine, that risks losing it.
Start with an instant online quote, or call and talk it through with us first. You'll have a clear, fixed price before any work begins.