The laptop was destroyed. The circuit board on the drive was burnt through. And the platters — where the data actually lives — had barely been touched.
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A fire left the laptop completely inoperable. It would not power on, which meant there was no way to reach the drive inside it — and the drive held everything a clothing shop runs on: financial records, inventory lists, supplier contacts and the customer database. There was no backup.
Fire-damaged drives arrive looking hopeless. Scorched labels, melted plastic, warped casing, soot. They are recovered far more often than anyone expects, and the reason is simple: the platters are metal or glass, they sit inside a sealed metal box, and the temperature that destroys the outside of a drive is a long way below the temperature at which the magnetic layer actually fails.
No power was reaching the drive at all — which is precisely why the platters were in good condition. A drive that cannot spin cannot damage itself.
by the heat. They were never going to fly again.
Minor heat exposure, some contamination, but the magnetic surface was readable.
That combination — dead electronics, dead heads, live platters — is the best possible outcome from a fire, and it is the usual one.
The drive imaged, and the records came back — financial reports, invoices, tax records, inventory, supplier contacts and the customer database.
Fire-damaged drives recover far better than anyone expects, for the reason set out above: the platters are the survivors. What limits the outcome is almost never the fire itself. It is what happened in the weeks afterwards — whether anyone applied power to a drive with a compromised board, and whether it was left to dry out while smoke residue and fire-brigade water quietly corroded the contacts.
The instinct after a fire or a flood is to dry it out and try it. Both halves of that instinct are wrong, and between them they destroy more fire-damaged drives than the fire does.
Do not power it on. If the board is compromised, applying voltage pushes the damage further in.
Do not dry it, and do not clean it. Water from the fire brigade evaporates and leaves behind everything dissolved in it; smoke deposits are acidic. A drive that has sat in a garage "drying out" since the fire is usually in far worse condition than one that arrives still wet and filthy.
Bag it as it is. Send it. Say what happened to it.
Drop the drive at our Quayside reception, or post it to us — it costs nothing to find out what happened. You get a written figure from the fixed bands before any work begins.