An Acer laptop wouldn't start after the mains dropped mid-use, hanging instead of loading Windows. The drive was intact but the file system had been left inconsistent by the abrupt cut. We removed the drive, imaged it, and repaired the structures to recover the files.
The laptop had been in use when the power failed, and afterwards it would not boot — hanging on start-up or looping instead of reaching the desktop. The owner's documents and photos were on it, with no backup. Rather than run repair tools that can overwrite recoverable data when a drive is already unstable, the sensible move was to stop and have the drive read properly, so it was brought in.
When a computer writes to a drive, it updates several things almost at once — the file's data, the directory entry, the allocation records. A sudden power loss can freeze that sequence half-finished, leaving the file system's structures inconsistent with one another. The result is a machine that won't boot, or boots and then can't read its own files, even though the data itself is largely intact. The danger afterwards is well-meaning repair: automatic fixers can discard exactly the half-written records a careful recovery would use to piece things back together.
The drive was removed from the laptop and cloned sector by sector through a write blocker. It read cleanly, confirming the fault was logical rather than a failing drive. All recovery then continued on the image, keeping the original untouched in case anything needed revisiting.
Working from the image, the inconsistent structures were analysed rather than blindly repaired. The boot record and allocation tables were reconciled, the directory tree rebuilt by matching surviving records to the actual data, and the volume reassembled with its original folders and file names. The owner's documents and photos were then extracted intact.
Files were opened across the recovered set to confirm they were whole, then returned on fresh media — and, since the drive itself was healthy, the laptop could simply have a fresh install afterwards. We noted that laptops are especially exposed to sudden power loss, and that a backup — even an automatic cloud folder for documents — turns an event like this into a non-issue.
Hardware imager with write blocker · manual file-system repair — boot-record, allocation-table and directory reconstruction. Read-only imaging, all work in-house in Belfast.
Send it to us for a free, no-obligation diagnostic. We’ll tell you what can be recovered and put a fixed price in writing before any work starts — and on most jobs, if we can’t get your data back, there’s nothing to pay. Post your device in, or drop it to us by appointment.
Usually, yes. A power cut mid-write tends to corrupt the file system while leaving the data intact, so the files can be recovered even though the machine won't start. Avoid running repair tools first — they can overwrite recoverable data.
Be careful. On a drive with recoverable data, automatic repair can discard the very records needed to rebuild your files. If the data matters and there's no backup, have the drive imaged first.
Yes — we remove the drive and recover from it directly, so whether the laptop boots or not doesn't matter to getting your data back.