Data Recovery Case File · Trust, Practice & Honest Limits · Triage Before Cost

Do Not Send All Four

His enquiry lists an accumulation rather than an incident. Four drives — two solid-state, two mechanical — pulled from desktops and laptops as each machine failed: "they were in Mac desktops and laptops when they failed. Both machines had some sort of start-up issue. The solid-state drives were the operating system drives. What would it cost to repair, recover, or transfer to a new" machine. The useful answer is not a price for four recoveries. It is an order of work, because at least two of these drives probably need nothing done to them at all.

The decode: the order to work in, and why it saves money

Start with the mechanical drives, and this may end the enquiry: he says the solid-state drives were the system drives, which means the mechanical ones were almost certainly data drives. Data drives play no part in starting a machine — so a machine with a start-up problem tells you nothing about them. Connected to any working computer through an inexpensive caddy, they will very often simply appear with everything on them. That is a fifteen-minute test per drive and it costs nothing.

Why the system drives may need less than he thinks: a system drive holds an operating system and applications, all of which are reinstallable and none of which are worth recovering. What matters on them is the user profile — the desktop and downloads folders, browser profiles with bookmarks and saved logins, mail data if a desktop client was used, and application settings. That is frequently a small set, and sometimes nothing at all if everything of value lived on the data drives.

So the first question is not what it costs, but what is actually on each: establishing contents drive by drive turns a request for four recoveries into a much smaller job. It is entirely normal for an enquiry like this to end with two drives readable at home, one needing nothing, and one genuine recovery.

The second question, and it costs nothing either: what is already elsewhere. Four drives accumulated over the life of two machines will contain a great deal of duplication — the same photographs, the same documents, migrated from machine to machine. Comparing what each holds against what is already on his current computer or in a cloud account narrows the genuinely irreplaceable material considerably.

Why sending all four blindly is the expensive route: it commissions four assessments for a question that could have been answered with a caddy, and it invites a quote for work that may not need doing. Nobody should pay to find out what is on a drive they can read themselves.

What not to do meanwhile: not put any drive back into the machine it came out of, since a machine that failed may have a power fault capable of damaging another drive. And not run recovery software against any of them until it is known which actually have problems.

On the bench

Each drive was assessed independently before any was quoted, since a request covering four drives frequently resolves into one genuine recovery once contents are known. The mechanical data drives were read first on a native connection — they play no part in starting a machine, so a start-up fault says nothing about them and many read immediately. Contents were enumerated and compared against material already held elsewhere, and recovery scoped only to drives holding unduplicated material.

The outcome

Each drive assessed separately, the readable ones identified at no cost and recovery scoped to what was genuinely unduplicated. Free assessment, one fixed written figure including VAT; where a drive has to be opened, 50% of parts and labour is payable upfront with the balance only on success — otherwise no recovery, no fee. The decode, for anyone with several failed drives: do not send them all. Data drives play no part in starting a machine, so a start-up fault says nothing about them — put each in a caddy and most will simply open. System drives mostly hold reinstallable software, with only the user profile worth recovering. And compare what each holds against what you already have elsewhere.

Our case files are drawn from genuine enquiries received by our laboratory over the past ten years, anonymised to protect client confidentiality. Each one describes the diagnostic and recovery procedure our engineers apply to that fault, using the equipment listed.