Jobs closed · written up after
Approval governs all of it. Nothing is published until the customer has been through the recovered material and told us to go ahead, and at that point every identifying detail comes out: the person, the town, the serial number. Each entry then points to the page dealing with that class of fault, for anyone wanting method rather than narrative. The entries below are illustrative examples written to show the shape a casebook entry takes; they are marked as such and will be replaced by genuine closed jobs as they are approved for publication.
Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
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The heads had stuck to the platter on impact, and the owner unplugged it and left it alone, which is why the platters were unmarked. Heads freed and replaced on the clean bench, the drive brought up through its own board so that its encryption key could be used, and imaged head by head over four nights. The photographs since 2014 came back complete.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseThe light had stopped and a supermarket adaptor had not helped. The adaptor was fine and the box's board had a failed regulator; the drive behind it had never powered since and was in perfect health. Board repaired, drive imaged through it, eleven years of a small charity's records back.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseOne of the two Seagates had failed at the heads; the other was fine. Heads replaced on the clean bench and the failed drive imaged head by head, the healthy one end to end. The stripe was reassembled from the two images with the block size read from the LaCie's own metadata, and the volume mounted whole.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseThe drive was hanging the USB bus while it retried bad reads at the start of the disk. Brought up on the bench with its retries controlled and imaged slowly around a damaged band over two nights. Everything except one video came back.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseThe drive read as blank on a dock, which is what a My Passport does without its board. The case had been kept, which mattered more than anything else. The board's regulator was repaired so that its key could be used, the drive imaged through it, and the volume mounted from the image.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseDropped in a rucksack and beeping at every port, then left alone. All four heads were stuck to the top platter; freed and replaced on the clean bench, the terminal unlocked, and the drive imaged head by head. A dissertation and three years of coursework came back untouched.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseThe Mac it backed up had been sold; the Time Capsule had not powered on since. Inside was a Seagate drive that had never failed. Imaged, the sparsebundle's bands reassembled and the volume inside mounted, the last snapshot copied out as folders. Forty years of documents on a fresh drive.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseThe owner clicked Cancel, unplugged it and sent it. The drive was healthy; the power cut had left the NTFS file table half-written. Imaged, the table repaired on the image from its mirror, every folder back with its name.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseThe lead had been yanked sideways and the socket came away with three of the board's tracks. Tracks rebuilt under magnification, a new socket fitted, the drive imaged through its own board. A student's four years of coursework the same week.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseTen years of photographs before a teenager formatted it for the console, which had written about 300GB over the old volume. The old NTFS file system was reconstructed from what survived and the photographs carved from the unwritten areas. Most came back; the family was told which did not.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseAn old caddy, a newer drive, and a prompt to initialise a disk that looked mostly empty. The owner said no, which was the whole job. Out of the box, on SATA, the drive read its full 3TB with the partition intact.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseThe heads had settled onto the platter over a decade in a loft. Lifted and the spindle freed on the bench, the drive brought up once, its 250GB imaged in a single pass. The photographs from a wedding in 1998 went to the family on a new drive.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseNothing is published without your say-so. The first look is free either way.