Newcastle is where you hand the drive over: the Quayside drop-off or postbox. Every single drive from Newcastle, Durham and Carlisle will follow exactly the same path across the same benches. This page is the tour of your journey: station by station what each piece of equipment is, what it does and why it decides which recoveries succeed.
Each recovery job goes through various stations depending on the type of job. For example, data may pass through a station designed specifically for intake and write blocking, another station for creating images of hard drives via specific hardware, a further station for working with firmware issues etc. Mechanical repair can be performed on the mechanical bench. Only those stations that are necessary for completing the job are used.
This initial station provides you protection against us.
Every device is logged and connected to a write-blocker before anyone reads even one sector. Once that has been done the original can be read but never altered, so no tool, no slip and no software quirk will ever leave your situation worse than when it arrived. Everything downstream happens to copies.
The primary distinction between a genuine laboratory environment and a home user running data recovery software lies in this workstation.
Every hard drive is treated as perfectly healthy by a computer, with extended timeouts (minutes), countless retries, and non-stop background reads, and that is what usually kills the bad one. It’s our DeepSpar imager which has taken control of the conversation here. The DeepSpar reads from sector-to-sector at its own discretion, has a timeout measured in milliseconds versus minutes, bypasses all the damage areas first then goes back to them, and also will power-cycle your device when it freezes up. The Atola Insight will sit next to it for forensic-quality work: hash-verified image files are the proof, in cold maths, that the original was never altered.
The order in which you read them is almost as important as reading itself. Your critical folders are always removed first; therefore, when a drive fails during an image, it has already given up your most valuable data.
What happens with the drives that seem like they have no problems but won’t show anything.
Inside every single hard drive is its own personal operating system: service area modules containing translator, defect tables and head maps that convert spinning disk into usable storage. If these become corrupted, we see the ghost drive: a drive detected as being zero gigabytes (GB), identified incorrectly (model name) or running but refusing to be read. The PC-3000 will speak each manufacturer’s engineering language (Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, Samsung etc.) and let us repair or modify those modules, disable an inactive head in the map, and allow the imaging bench to use the drive once again. No Windows tool has access to this level; this isn’t sales hype, it is design.
How and where drives really are opened, and why what is on the shelf is as important as technical skills.
Head swap and platter work is done with great care because, at 7,200 rpm, a platter will treat one speck of dust as a pebble on the highway. On the other side of the bench sit the donor shelves where we keep all of our purchased used drives that were purchased strictly for their parts. They are organised into groups of similar model families, where they originated from, and what firmware version they have. A transplant can only be made if there is a donor that matches closely enough; therefore, having the correct donor in inventory can make the difference whether or not your recovery is completed this week versus being placed on hold while waiting for parts from around the world.
There is also a kit located on the same bench for solid state drive failures; this includes NAND readers to extract data directly from the memory chips when the controller fails and the monolith work required for single piece cards and sticks. No matter how the data gets extracted, once it has been reconstructed, verified file by file, and the job is complete, it returns to you. We maintain the case files, a diary for the lab which provides documentation of how each of these processes was applied to actual failures.
No. The station-by-station tour described above is the entire journey of your device (from intake to return) that our own engineers handle from start to finish within our own lab. This is a fixed company policy not just a marketing claim.
The reason this is so expensive is because you can’t get anything else to do this. A platform like the PC-3000’s firmware will cost five figures; then there’s the training required to use it effectively. Hardware imagers (like the one above) are made in low volume, which is an expense for a small trade, and a donor library is expensive due to thousands of pounds worth of disks purchased solely for parts. This kit is why hard cases have any chance of recovery at all.
You are welcome to visit our drop-off location at Rotterdam House (2nd Floor, 116 Quayside) Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, to deliver a device and discuss the job details; there’s no need for an appointment, but please get a quote from us first. All recovery work is performed internally by our engineers in our lab and we do not sub-contract to a third party.
The first station is at no cost to you: a free diagnostic in less than 48 hours and a written quote before any recovery will begin.