A family in Bromley clearing their late father's flat found an external drive with its socket pushed sideways and, in a shoebox underneath it, four bare laptop drives with nothing written on any of them. Nobody knew which was which, or whether any of them still worked. What they wanted was the photographs, wherever those turned out to be.
| Media | An external hard drive whose USB socket has been forced out of shape, plus four unlabelled 2.5-inch laptop drives of unknown make, age and condition found alongside it. |
| What was reported | External hard drive with a bent connector, will not connect, plus four bare laptop drives of unknown identity from the same house clearance, family photographs wanted from whichever holds them. |
| Fault class | Physical, at the socket. Repeated sideways load had torn the connector's anchoring and cracked its joints, so it could no longer be plugged in. The disk behind it was sound. The four loose drives had no single fault between them and were assessed individually. |
| On the bench | Socket examined under a stereo microscope, the anchoring points and cracked joints reflowed and the connector re-secured so the drive could hold a stable connection, then read behind a hardware write blocker on PC-3000 UDMA and imaged on DeepSpar. The four loose drives were each attached as data-only devices, profiled in turn, and imaged where they were healthy enough to allow it. Volumes parsed in R-Studio, photographs located and validated by rendering. |
A socket is a mechanical part that happens to carry electricity. It is soldered to a board at a handful of small pads and anchored by two tabs. Lean on a plugged-in cable often enough and those anchors let go, after which the pads take the strain and crack. The result looks catastrophic and is one of the more repairable things that happens to a drive.
Bending it back is not the repair. Reshaping the shell without dealing with the joints underneath gives you a socket that seems to fit and still does not conduct, and the attempt usually finishes off whatever pads were left. The work is at the board, under magnification, not at the metalwork.
Unlabelled drives are read, not identified. There is no way to tell from the outside what is on a bare laptop disk or why it was taken out of a machine. Each one is attached as a data device, profiled for health, and imaged if it can be. Guessing which is the important one wastes the only thing that matters, which is the number of times a fragile drive can be spun.
Four drives is four jobs. They came out of different machines at different times and had failed, or not failed, for different reasons. Two read straight off. One had a weak area that needed a slower pass. One never readied at all and was reported back as such, without a charge for it.
The external's socket was examined under the microscope, where two anchor tabs had lifted and three pads had cracked. The joints were reflowed and the connector re-secured to the board so it could take a cable without moving. From there the drive read normally behind a hardware write blocker on PC-3000 UDMA and imaged on DeepSpar in one pass.
The four loose drives were then worked one at a time, each attached as a data device only, none of them asked to boot anything. Two imaged without incident. The third had a slow region that took a second pass with the head map restricted to it. The fourth drew current and never readied, and was set aside rather than run repeatedly. R-Studio read the volumes out of the images and the photographs were rendered rather than counted.
The photographs turned out to be spread across the external and two of the loose drives, which is exactly why all of them were read rather than the likeliest one. Everything recovered was consolidated into one folder tree and returned on fresh media, with the fourth drive reported honestly as no result.
Each drive is priced on its own at £300 + VAT. Rebuilding a socket is electronic work, so that drive carried the 50% upfront term with the balance on success, and the drive that produced nothing was not charged for.
Do not force a cable into a damaged socket. Every attempt loads the joints further and can take a repairable connector past the point where there is anything left to solder to. If you have inherited a box of bare drives, resist the urge to try each one in a caddy until something works: a drive with a mechanical fault has a limited number of start-ups in it and testing spends them on nothing. Send them together, say what you are looking for, and they will be assessed one at a time. Drives that produce nothing are reported as nothing, and nothing is charged for them.
These files are written up from genuine enquiries taken from households and businesses in Bracknell, across Berkshire and Surrey and into London, with names, firms and anything else identifying stripped out. Each one sets down how the fault was reasoned through, the method it actually needed and the equipment it was worked on. One of them is a job that was turned away, which belongs here as much as the rest of them.
A drive that stops a computer starting is shorting the supply, and the platters behind it are usually untouched
Liquid travels down and inwards, so the storage has to be assessed on its own rather than assumed innocent
A drive that announces itself to the port but never appears has a mechanism stuck short of ready
Examining it is free and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure goes to you in writing and does not move afterwards, and a logical fault carries no fix, no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.