Data recovery case files

Every case below began as a genuine enquiry to our laboratory. Names and identifying details are removed; the faults, the diagnostics and the recovery procedures are documented as our engineers work them, using the equipment named on each page.

Apple Mac

• Case 243: Sounds healthy, halts everything: a drive that froze Finder, emptied Disk Utility, and hung Terminal — decoded and imaged past its own silences
• Case 246: Copy of a copy, or the original: a stalled Apple Store handover, a stick that couldn't carry it — and the rest of the data recovered from where it always lived

Apple Silicon

• Case 207: Revive, never restore — yet: an M1 Max that wouldn't start, a score that existed nowhere else, and a recovery that was mostly sequencing

Business & IT

• Case 242: Two dead drives, one intact promise: choosing the better member of a failed RAID 1 — and the organisation's data brought back

Business & Research

• Case 223: One partition of two, priced honestly: why cost follows the fault, not the gigabytes — and a research lab's data brought back

Creative Professionals

• Case 213: Beeping, but functional: why intermittent symptoms are the easiest warnings to ignore — and an editor's drive recovered after the export that ended it
• Case 232: The drive that unplugged itself from existence: total invisibility decoded — and a slowing computer's real culprit named

DIY Interventions

• Case 220: The deepest anyone's gone before writing in: an amateur head transplant, audited under filtered air — and what survived it

Deadlines & Travel

• Case 227: The patient stays, the person flies: a visiting student's failed drive, the truth about fast, and the recovery that crossed an ocean afterwards

Desktop Drives

• Case 211: Twenty minutes of false hope: what a dying drive's brief revivals are for — and the decade recovered after the window closed
• Case 212: One drive, whole machine frozen: the startup hostage situation decoded — and an exemplary removal rewarded
• Case 215: The drive that switched the whole computer off: a short circuit's veto, a clean elimination, and the recovery behind it
• Case 235: Spin-up confident, ticking after: a very familiar 2TB patient, a supplied destination, and a clean local recovery

Desktop Externals

• Case 210: The repairs that bounced: initialize attempts, DiskPart commands, a size of zero — and a drive whose failure shielded it from its rescue
• Case 214: Twelve terabytes, one knock: a house-move casualty at the largest scale — and the long, patient imaging that brought it home
• Case 222: Worked seven times harder than its class: a nine-year backup drive's own statistics, decoded — and the selective recovery its owner designed
• Case 230: Not recognised is not gone: a two-month-old drive's format demand, the exact error decoded — and the files behind it recovered
• Case 238: The parameter that stopped being correct: Windows' oddest storage error decoded — and a drive imaged before the recommended repairs could touch it

Diagnostics

• Case 229: The bridge answered, the drive drew nothing: forensic reading of a System Information listing — and the update acquitted along the way

Drones & Aerial

• Case 203: Dried is not decontaminated: a drone's sea-soaked microSD, the corrosion clock, and the holiday footage recovered

Encryption

• Case 244: The door broke, the lock held: a self-encrypted laptop's failed boot chain — and the offline decryption that used the one thing he still had

Family Archives

• Case 250: The brother's keeper: a buzzing drive, a ghost capacity, the family's photographs and a singer's backing tracks — the archive's 250th case, recovered

Games Consoles

• Case 202: Two donor boards, two different failures: an accidental experiment in PCB compatibility — and the console drive recovered properly

Honest Economics

• Case 237: When the data is replaceable: a striped movie library, a drawer full of original discs, and the arithmetic a fair lab does out loud

Honest Limits

• Case 233: When the original is already gone: hunting the last copies of a deadline's work inside a rescue-app clone — recovered in part, accounted in full

Laptop Drives

• Case 224: The most ordinary failure in computing, priced in the open: a clicking laptop drive, an honest worry about cost, and both handled properly

Logistics

• Case 248: Distance is a shipping label, not a barrier: a clicking drive posted from overseas, recovered at home, and returned two ways

Makers & Hobbyists

• Case 204: Linux told him first: a shared drive's decline announced in Pi error logs, ignored by Windows, and finished at the bench

Memory Cards

• Case 201: No R/B# on the map: a salt-and-impact microSD that defeated a professional attempt — and the protocol-level workaround that finished it
• Case 236: Format interrupted, apps defeated, photos intact: a wedding card's worst hour decoded — and the day carved back, frame by frame
• Case 240: Snapped, married, and merely broken: a three-card triage — and the adoptable-storage decode every Android owner should read before formatting
• Case 241: A year of photos behind one impossible file: sudden filesystem collapse decoded — and a card preserved by exactly the right instinct

NAS & RAID

• Case 221: Pruned by its own repair, rescued by its own mirror: a photographer's RAID 1, and the out-of-date drive that turned witness
• Case 226: "The drives seem to be OK. So—": finishing a well-diagnosed enquiry — two healthy disks, one dead enclosure, and the translation between

Portable Drives

• Case 205: Two machines, two half-answers, one correct customer: a beeping drive's stuck heads, released — and the OS discrepancy explained
• Case 206: Two failures, months apart, discovered together: a dropped drive, a backup that had quietly stopped, and the critical window brought back
• Case 208: The doorman answered; the resident didn't: an enclosure visible, a drive absent, and the head-swap that reunited them with their data
• Case 216: Expensive doesn't mean drop-proof: an eighteen-inch fall, a beeping LaCie, and an honest answer to a fair complaint
• Case 217: An error on the minute, every minute: Event ID 154 decoded — and the drive behind the schedule recovered
• Case 218: After the lab that failed: an honest accounting of a much-travelled dropped drive — and the 250GB that came home anyway
• Case 219: Listed, sized, and unreachable: a Passport serving its index while its contents fail — and the files brought out from behind the listing
• Case 225: Years on the shelf, one look inside: a dropped Samsung's honest history — and the photos that waited through both
• Case 228: "They do not have a clean room": a shop that knew its boundary, a teacher's life's resources, and the head-swap on the other side of the line
• Case 231: Two clicks, one instant unplug: the internet's best advice actually followed — and the honest answer about whether patience buys a discount

Solid State Drives

• Case 234: Knows its size, lost its map: a methodically isolated mSATA SSD, the translator decode — and the files behind the "Unallocated"
• Case 247: Two hundred files, one failing checksum at a time: CRC errors decoded, a documented model footnoted — and a sync habit that turned disaster into a list

Trust & Process

• Case 209: From "it's clicking" to "it's on this new drive": the entire recovery process, explained through one 4TB patient

Trust & Scope

• Case 239: Nothing to recover: a wiped, bricked NAS, an honest scope conversation — and why the referral out is part of the archive

USB Flash

• Case 245: Recovered: somebody else's past. Why scanning software returns folders that were never yours — and the stick's real contents, read properly

Working From Home

• Case 249: The journey acquitted, the software audited: a remote-work drive's real fault found beneath a partition tool's fingerprints — and the edit projects recovered

Facing something similar? Call Belfast Data Recovery on 028 9002 0144 for a free assessment and fixed quote.