A fall stalled the spindle and damaged the heads — rebuilt in the clean area and imaged before it could degrade.
A Sony VAIO that had been dropped and would no longer boot, its drive clicking away with the tell-tale sound of a head fault.
Opened in our clean-air environment, the platter stack wouldn't turn freely and the heads showed damage from the knock. Both faults had to be put right before the drive could read a single sector, and the order matters — there's no point freeing the motor if the heads can't track the platters afterwards.
In the clean area we freed the platter stack and fitted a matched donor head set, pairing it to the drive so the replacement heads read the surfaces correctly. A drive rebuilt after a seizure is fragile and unpredictable, so imaging went onto a DeepSpar Disk Imager, which held power and command timeouts under tight control and let us capture the strongest surfaces first before asking anything of the regions the impact had touched. The PC3000 covered the firmware side. Some areas of the platters had taken light surface damage in the event, and damaged media always costs a little data no matter how carefully it's read.
From the image we rebuilt the file system and checked the recordings, project files and documents opened and played correctly before writing everything to fresh media.
We recovered the drive's data — the recordings and the great majority of the project files — over eight working days. The episode is the strongest possible argument for backing up creative work as you go: a dropped laptop is a moment's accident, but the recordings on its drive can stand for months that can never be repeated.
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.
Usually, yes. A dead laptop is often a motherboard fault sitting over a perfectly healthy drive — we take the drive out and image it on the PC3000, or recover a failed drive in our clean-air environment.
From £300 plus VAT, with no fix, no fee on most jobs and a fixed written quote before any work.
For most laptops the drive can be removed and sent on its own — a local computer shop will do it in minutes. Where the storage is soldered to the board, or you'd rather not open it up, send the whole laptop and we'll take care of removal and testing.
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.