Devices · the disk that lives in a bag
Open one and you find a bare hard disk plus a small bridge board wired between it and the USB socket. Bridge boards fail in their own right, and on most models they also hold the encryption keys — which is why the whole unit has to arrive at the Reading bench, cable and all. Add what a rucksack does to a spinning mechanism and there are two faults to tell apart before any recovery begins. The first look is free; a single drive is £300 + VAT, quoted in writing.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
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| What you are seeing | What is likely wrong | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| Drive not accessible, and Windows wants to format it first | A cable pulled out mid-write left the volume RAW; everything under it is intact | Say no, then unplug it |
| USB device not recognized — Windows cannot put a name to it | Nothing shows up — either the bridge or the disk | Swap in one other cable, then stop |
| Windows says only: Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) | Windows is given no device identity at all | The bridge has failed — bench work |
| Data error (cyclic redundancy check) on open | The disk behind the board has failing sectors | Unplug it and let it rest |
| Disk Management displays RAW, or Not Initialized | The partition table cannot be read, so Windows offers to wipe the lot | Refuse. Initialising is what finishes the job off. |
| Every port reports a malfunctioning USB device | The 5V rail in the case has failed, or the bridge has | Boards fail long before platters do |
A case number goes on your device the day it reaches us, and an engineer then finds the real fault — free, and before anything else happens. You are told plainly what will come back and what will not, with one fixed figure in writing beside it. Nothing chargeable starts until you have read that and said yes.
One question comes before every other: was it the case or the disk? Plenty of externals turn up inert, LaCie and Iomega more often than most, with the disk behind that failed board perfectly sound.
This is not something anybody turned on — it shipped that way. The question is where the encryption is being done: in the enclosure, or on the drive. Portables usually do it in the bridge, which puts the keys on that small board rather than anywhere on the platters. Recover them from the board and the noise turns back into a folder tree.
A hardware imager takes a sector-by-sector copy first, and everything after that runs against the copy rather than against the drive you posted. Recovered data travels home on new media with the postage paid at this end — a Whiteknights postgraduate's only fieldwork disk, a family archive out of a Caversham loft, and the procedure does not change between them.
You see the file list first, then decide. Nothing is invoiced until you have said yes, and on most jobs there is no fee at all if the data does not come back. What we pull off goes onto media bought in for your job, and the postage home is ours. The case stays open on the bench until you tell us the files open on your own machine.
Worth knowing: through 2023, owners of 2TB and 4TB SanDisk Extreme portable SSDs reported files disappearing without warning. Western Digital issued a firmware update in May 2023, and that August it faced a US class action after drives kept failing on the new firmware. If yours is behaving oddly, have an image taken now rather than next month.
Nine days from the deadline, the Passport started to tick. A head stack off a matched donor went in, then the image was pulled deliberately slowly. WD puts the encryption keys on the bridge board of these units, so the keys came off the board and never off the platters. Chapters, figures and references all came back with a week still in hand.
No — send it as it stands, case, cable and all. On most portables the USB board does the encrypting rather than the disk itself, and a healthy disk arriving alone is only ciphertext to us. The lab's shipping form asks for external drives in their own enclosures in any case.
No. That prompt only means Windows cannot identify the file system. It says nothing at all about what the disk holds. Say yes and you overwrite the very structures a rebuild is worked out from.
Moving is hard on a spinning disk: hours of vibration, a good deal of handling, then a different temperature at the other end. A mechanism that was already marginal often declines to spin up once it gets there. It is one of the commonest stories on this bench.
Nearly always. The state of the plastic case counts for very little. Three things do: the disk itself, the small board bolted to it, and how much life is left in the bridge chip, since the encryption keys have to come out of it.
You pay nothing for the look. What comes back is a list — the files that opened, the ones that did not, and one fixed figure to finish the job. Leave it switched off until you have that in writing.