Devices · drives carried in a rucksack
Open up one of the external drives posted in from Cardiff and you find a hard disk, plus a small USB bridge board standing between the disk and the socket. The bridge fails on its own account, and on most models it is also where the encryption keys live. Add the knocks a bag hands out and you have two distinct faults to untangle before anything else begins.
Describe the symptoms to an engineer
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| What shows up | What has gone wrong | Do this now |
|---|---|---|
| The disk in drive X: is not formatted. Do you want to format it now? | A cable pulled during a write left the volume RAW; the files below are intact | Do not hit Format |
| USB device not recognized — the device you just plugged in malfunctioned | It never enumerates — bridge or disk | Try one other cable, then stop |
| Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) in Device Manager | The device never identifies itself to Windows | Bridge fault — one for the bench |
| Data error (cyclic redundancy check), drive inaccessible | Bad sectors on the disk inside the shell | Unplug it and stop |
| In Disk Management: RAW, or Not Initialized | The partition table is unreadable, so Windows offers to wipe it | Refuse — initialising destroys it |
| Windows flags a USB device attached to this PC as malfunctioning | The 5V rail in the caddy, or the bridge itself | Boards fail long before platters ever do |
The diagnosis costs you nothing. Every item that arrives is logged under a case number of its own, and an engineer works out what has actually failed — then tells you plainly which files can come back and which cannot. The price follows that: one fixed figure, in writing, and no work begins until you have read it and said go ahead.
One question comes before all the others: has the housing failed, or the disk? A good number of externals that turn up completely dead — LaCie and Iomega among the worst — hold a healthy disk behind burnt electronics.
Nobody switches this on; it arrives switched on. What counts is where the scrambling happens — in the case, or on the disk. On most externals it is the bridge, which means the keys stay on the board and never reach the platters. Recover them and unreadable sectors become folders again.
A hardware imager makes a sector-by-sector copy before anything else. The rebuild works from that copy and nothing else, and what comes out travels home on new media, postage ours.
Nothing is billed while you are still deciding. A complete listing of what came off the drive reaches you first, and the invoice only follows your yes. Files travel back on media bought new for the job, return postage ours, and we do not close it here until every one of them opens on the machine you will use.
Worth knowing: through 2023 the SanDisk Extreme portables in 2TB and 4TB began losing files without warning. Owners brought a class action against Western Digital in the US, and a firmware update released while the case ran did not close the matter. If you own one and it is misbehaving, have an image taken now.
Nine days out from the hand-in, the ticking started. We fitted a head stack from a donor, imaged at a deliberately slow pace, and lifted the encryption keys from the bridge board. Every chapter and every reference came back, and the thesis was home a week before the deadline.
Please do not. Send the whole thing in, whatever state the casing is in. On most of these drives the encrypting happens on the USB board rather than on the disk, so a healthy disk that arrives without its board reads as static.
Never. That prompt tells you one thing: the file system is unreadable to Windows. It says nothing at all about your files. Agree to it and you wipe the structures a rebuild depends on.
A journey in a van is punishing — vibration, rough handling and a change of temperature, all at once. A disk with little life left in it will often stop the first time it spins after the trip. We see it most weeks.
Almost always. The shell it came in is of little interest to us. The things that count are the disk's own condition, the state of its circuit board, and whether enough of the bridge chip survives to release the keys.
A failing drive has only so many starts left in it. Spend none of them. Keep the power off, and the free diagnosis will tell you what is still readable.