No hardware fault whatsoever — a corrupted partition table made a healthy drive look empty. Rebuilt and recovered.
A customer's PC booted one morning to a message that the drive needed formatting, and what had been a disk full of files now showed as empty, unallocated space. Understandably they feared the worst — yet a drive that abruptly looks empty is very often nothing to do with hardware. Here the disk was mechanically perfect; the fault was logical. The partition table — the small structure that tells Windows where each partition starts and stops — had corrupted, leaving every file completely intact but invisible to the operating system.
On our equipment the drive read cleanly with no mechanical trouble, confirming a logical rather than physical problem. When a partition table is damaged the data itself is usually untouched — it's only the map to it that has been lost. That's a far more hopeful position than the formatting prompt suggests, so long as nothing is written to the drive in the meantime.
Even with a perfectly healthy drive we never work on the original. We took a full image on the PC3000 and did everything on the copy: scanning it to find the true start of the file system, rebuilding the partition structure and repairing the file-system records so the data could be read back in place. Since nothing had actually been overwritten — the customer had sensibly stopped using the machine — it all came back.
With the partition rebuilt, the file system mounted exactly as it had before. We checked the documents, photos and other files opened correctly, then wrote it all to fresh media.
The drive's full contents came back within three working days. The key lesson, one we repeat often: if a drive suddenly asks to be formatted or turns up empty, don't format it and stop using it — the data is frequently still there, and continuing to write to the drive is the one thing that can truly lose it.
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.