Devices · the disk that lives in a bag
Open one and you will find a bare hard drive plus a little 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, so the whole unit has to arrive at the Oxford intake lab, with its cable and power supply. Add what a rucksack does to spinning mechanisms and there are two faults to distinguish before any recovery work can begin. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Windows will not let you access your drive and wants you to format it first | Pulling the cable out mid-write leaves the volume RAW, but everything written underneath it is still intact | Say no, then unplug it |
| USB device not recognized: Windows does not know how to give it an identifier | Nothing shows up when you connect it: either the bridge or the disk has failed | Swap in one other cable, then stop |
| Windows can't tell you anything about the device; it simply states: Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) | Windows is given no information about the USB device | The bridge has failed — bench work |
| Data error (cyclic redundancy check) on open | Bad sectors are developing on the hard disk inside the enclosure | Unplug it and let it rest |
| Disk Management displays RAW, or Not Initialized | Windows offers to write over the entire disk because it can't read the partition table | Don't. Initialising writes to the disk and finishes the job off. |
| Every port reports a malfunctioning USB device | The 5V power supply in the case has failed, or the bridge has | Boards fail long before platters do |
A case number is assigned to your device when we receive it. An engineer then finds the real fault (free) before anything else occurs; you will be advised clearly of what will be returned and what will not, along with a single written price. Charges cannot begin until you have read this and accepted.
The first thing to determine is whether it's the enclosure or the disk inside that is bad. Plenty of external drives arrive looking dead when the disk behind the failed board is actually fine, and most often those are from LaCie and Iomega.
This was not an option anyone turned on; it came that way. The real question is whether the encryption is happening within the enclosure itself or at the drive. Portable drives typically encrypt at the bridge (that small printed circuit board), which puts the keys there rather than anywhere on the platters. Recover those keys off the board and the noise turns back into your folder tree.
Hardware imagers create an exact copy of all sectors from the original drive first. The rest of the process is then completed against the image instead of the drive you posted. The recovered files are sent home on new media, with the postage paid at this end. Whether it is a Whiteknights postgraduate’s only fieldwork disk or a family archive from a Caversham attic, the process remains identical.
You look at the file list first and make a decision about what to do. We will never invoice anything until you have said yes, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. All of the information that we recover will be put on new media purchased by us specifically for this job, and our company pays the cost of postage back to you. The case stays open on the bench until you tell us the files open on your own machine.
Worth knowing: through 2023, owners of the 2TB and 4TB SanDisk Extreme portable SSDs reported files disappearing without any warning. Western Digital released a firmware update in May 2023; however, by August of that year it had been named in a US class action after drives kept failing on the new firmware. If your drive is behaving oddly, have an image taken now rather than next month.
Nine days before the deadline, the Passport began ticking. A head stack from a matched donor went in, and the image was pulled very slowly. WD places the encryption keys on the bridge board of these units, so the keys came off the board and never off the platters. All the chapters, figures and references were returned with a week still to spare.
No. First get a quote, then send it as it stands (case, cable, power supply and all) without making any changes. On most portable devices a USB bridge on the board performs the encryption instead of the hard drive itself, so a good hard drive sent by itself is just ciphertext to us. The lab's shipping form also asks for external drives to arrive in their own enclosures.
No. This prompt only indicates that Windows can't determine the file system. It tells you nothing about what the disk holds. If you answer "yes", you will be overwriting the very structures a rebuild is worked out from.
There are real risks in moving a spinning disk: hours of vibration, a lot of handling, and a different temperature at the other end. A mechanism that was already marginal tends to fail when it has to spin up for the first time after the move. It is one of the commonest stories on this bench.
Nearly always. The condition of the plastic casing does not matter much. Three factors decide it: the disk itself; the small board attached to it; and how much life is left in the bridge chip, as this is where the encryption keys have to come from.
There is no charge for the look. You then receive a list of the files that opened, those that did not, and a fixed amount to complete the job. Keep it switched off until you have received that in writing.