A family in Sutton were sorting out a late grandmother's flat and found an HP Pavilion netbook that had stopped working years before she died. There was no charger for it, no way of testing it, and a strong suspicion from everyone in the room that a machine that old and that dead would have nothing left in it. A nephew who fixes his own computers took the drive out and posted that instead.
| Media | A 2.5-inch drive taken out of an HP Pavilion netbook that stopped working several years ago and has no charger. It holds family photographs and documents. |
| What was reported | HP Pavilion netbook, stopped working several years ago, no charger available, unused since, drive removed and sent on its own, family photographs and documents hoped for. |
| Fault class | None on the disk. The laptop had failed, which is a different object from the storage inside it. The drive readied normally, read at full speed and had a clean defect list. Whatever had killed the machine had not involved the disk at all. |
| On the bench | Attached as a data device behind a hardware write blocker on PC-3000 UDMA with firmware and defect lists reviewed, imaged on DeepSpar in a single pass, the volume parsed in R-Studio from the image, deleted material recovered where it was still intact, photographs validated by rendering and everything written to fresh media in the folder structure it was found in. |
A laptop is a reader, not a container. Whatever went wrong with the netbook happened to its board, its screen or its power circuitry, and none of those are where the photographs live. The drive is a separate component that can be attached to entirely different equipment, which is what happened.
The missing charger is a red herring for the same reason. Nothing needs to power that laptop again. If it had arrived whole it would have been an obstacle rather than a help, because stripping machines is not work this lab takes on and the drive would have had to come out anyway.
Sitting unused for years costs a drive nothing. There is a persistent belief that data decays on an idle disk. It does not, in any span a household would notice. The realistic risks of long storage are damp and physical damage, and this one had been in a warm flat in a drawer.
The genuine limit here is not the drive; it is what was on it. A netbook of that era was somebody's second machine. What it holds is whatever she happened to save locally, which turned out to be a great deal more than the family expected, but the bench cannot conjure files that were never there.
The drive was attached as a data device behind a write blocker and profiled before anything was read from it. Its firmware answered normally, its defect list was almost empty, and it held full speed across the whole surface, which put it in better condition than most drives half its age.
It was imaged in one pass on DeepSpar and set aside. R-Studio parsed the volume from the image, and because the drive was intact it was also worth recovering deleted material, some of which was years old and still complete. Photographs were rendered on screen to prove them, and everything was written to fresh media with the original folder structure preserved so the family could see where things had come from.
Around four thousand photographs came back, along with letters, a scanned address book and a folder of recipes. The netbook was never powered on at any point and did not need to be. The drive went home with the recovered copy.
One drive, £300 + VAT, whether it is a year old or fifteen. Nothing physical was involved, so the job sat inside no fix, no fee and the invoice followed a result rather than an attempt.
Do not go looking for a charger and do not send the whole laptop. Stripping hardware is not something this lab does, and it is ten minutes' work for any repair shop, so the drive is best freed before it is packed. Once it is out, resist the urge to put it in a caddy and browse it, particularly if the machine failed suddenly, because a drive that has a fault has a limited number of start-ups left. Age is not the problem people expect it to be: what damages a stored drive is damp, heat and being knocked about, not the passing of time. Post the bare drive, wrapped so it cannot move, and say what you are hoping to find.
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 will not turn is either an electronics fault or a seized mechanism, and the two are separated by current
A drive that stops a computer starting is shorting the supply, and the platters behind it are usually untouched
A bent socket is a repairable joint, and unlabelled drives are read one at a time rather than guessed at
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.