Soaked, sooty or still damp
Most of the harm on these Cardiff jobs happens after the water has gone. Pull the drive out of a flooded kitchen or a burnt-out office and the platters are still sealed away from both — it is the circuit board on the outside that took it. Then it gets stood on a radiator, or plugged in for a quick look, or left a fortnight while the salts dry hard into the contacts. Power off, still wet, sealed in a bag, in today's post.
Describe the symptoms to an engineer
0800 6890668
| Warning signs | What has gone wrong | Do this now |
|---|---|---|
| Completely dead since the soaking | The board copped it. Behind the seal, the platters will very likely still read as normal | Bag it wet and seal the bag |
| It trips the socket, or kills the power supply | The board is shorted. Each attempt pushes another surge at the head preamp | Stop trying it |
| Green or white crust round the contacts | Corrosion already under way, and it does not stop | Do not let it sit |
| Pulled from the fire, casing intact | Alloy kept the platters in; a burnt board is a part we can source | Keep it shut, carry it flat |
| Soot over the connector and the breather filter | Grit, and acidic with it. One spin and it scores its own surfaces | Do not clean the soot off |
| Sea water reached it | Chloride attacks the coating itself — the worst water a drive can meet | Into a sealed bag, wet |
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.
Sealed in a bag, a wet drive arrives wet. Dry it out on the way and everything the water was carrying settles on the contacts as crystals. Fire jobs come in exactly as found, soot and all.
Deposits are stripped away, the contact strip is polished down to bare metal, and a donor board of the right match goes on — carrying the ROM chip lifted off your original.
A clean-up only buys time; the corrosion restarts. So the imaging runs that same day, and once a complete sector-by-sector copy exists we work from that and shelve the drive.
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.
Two things settle most of these jobs: whether anyone hit the power button, and how long the drive sat about before it went in the post. Both are decided well before it gets near a bench. Very little of this work is dramatic. Natural Resources Wales counted 26 flooded properties in Cardiff during Storm Dennis in February 2020, and most drives that reach us never met a river at all — a burst pipe, a washing machine that let go overnight, a flat roof after a wet week. They come back as ordinary jobs, as long as nobody dried them out or plugged them in first.
Nobody reached for a hairdryer, and nobody plugged it in to see. That is what saved the job. The drive went into a sealed bag wet, and into the post the same afternoon. At the bench the contacts were cleaned, the ROM was moved onto a donor board, and a full image was done within days. Two decades of family pictures came home.
Usually it does, as long as two things held: nobody switched it on while it was wet, and it reached the bench quickly. A soaking takes out the circuit board, not the recording surfaces, and boards can be replaced.
No. The water doing the harm sits inside a sealed casing that rice cannot reach. What it does add is starch dust and grit at the connector, and every day buried in the tub is one more day of corrosion.
Often there is. Alloy keeps the platters shut in, and scorched electronics are parts we can replace. The cases that do end badly are the ones where heat has warped the metal, or soot has worked in through the breather filter. Send it as it left the building — closed, unwashed and unplugged.
No, and we know it feels wrong. Whatever the water dissolved is left behind once it evaporates, crystallising across the contacts and into every gap the drive was sitting in. Seal it wet, and let it stay wet until an engineer opens the bag.
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.