Data Recovery Case File · NAS & Network Storage · One Failed, One Fine

The Company Drive, in a Machine That Is Also Someone's PC

His enquiry described an arrangement that is extremely common in small businesses and rarely described this clearly. Two drives in one machine, which also serves the company: "one is my C: drive, which is personal to me — that one is fine. The other drive is the company shared drive where all the important files and data are contained. This is the one that has failed and we cannot get at this important information. Also includes our mail. Our IT guy will provide a new hard drive, but we do need the data recovered." Two things follow. The healthy drive has already eliminated half the possible causes, and the mail files are the part that will hurt most if they are missed.

The decode: what the working drive proves, and the files people forget

What the healthy C: drive establishes for nothing: a genuinely useful control. Both drives share the same power supply, the same controller, the same cabling environment and the same machine. One works perfectly. That eliminates the power supply, the motherboard's storage controller and the machine generally — the fault is in the failed drive itself or its own cable. Very few enquiries arrive with that already narrowed, and it means no time is spent on the host.

The part most people overlook, and it matters more than the documents: the mail. Desktop mail applications store everything — messages, folders, calendars, contacts, sent items, years of correspondence — inside one or two large database files rather than as individual items. Those files are frequently the single most valuable thing on a drive and the thing nobody thinks to name. They are also the most fragile, because a database file is open and being written continuously while the application runs, so a drive that failed during use may have left it mid-write. Naming those files explicitly, and having them validated by opening rather than merely recovered, is worth doing deliberately.

Why validation rather than recovery is the point for mail: a mail database can come back at full size and refuse to load, or load and be missing recent folders. That is a different outcome from a document, which either opens or does not. So the deliverable should include confirmation that the mail file mounts and its folders are present.

The uncomfortable structural point, said once: the company's shared data was on a single drive with no redundancy, inside a machine that is also somebody's workstation. That is not unusual and it is worth naming plainly, because the same arrangement will produce the same outcome again. The replacement being supplied is the moment to change it — a second drive mirroring the first, or an automated copy to separate storage, costs very little against the disruption currently being experienced.

The coordination point: with internal IT supplying a new drive, delivering the recovered data onto that drive, in its original folder structure, saves a rebuild — and the mail files need placing where the application expects them rather than simply copied into a folder.

On the bench

The drive was imaged write-blocked on the Atola Insight Forensic before any repair was attempted, so that every reconstruction happened against a copy. Structures were rebuilt on the image, and the mail data files were located and validated specifically — mounted and their folder trees confirmed present, since a mail database can return at full size and fail to load, which no file listing would reveal. Delivery was co-ordinated onto the replacement drive supplied by internal IT, in the original folder structure.

The outcome

The drive imaged write-blocked, structures rebuilt from the copy and the mail databases validated by mounting rather than merely recovered. 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 whose second drive failed in a working machine: the healthy drive is a free control that eliminates the power supply, the controller and the machine itself. And name the mail explicitly — desktop mail applications keep years of correspondence, contacts and calendars inside one or two large database files that are open and being written whenever the application runs, so they are both the most valuable thing on the drive and the most fragile.

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.