The flash was untouched - the controller had hung and nothing could reach it. A vendor-mode reset brought it back.
A freelancer closed their Asus ZenBook one evening with a week of client work on it, and the next morning the BIOS saw no drive at all. There had been no drop, no spill, no warning — it simply vanished overnight. NVMe solid-state drives fail like this when the controller hangs: the flash memory itself is usually completely intact, but with the controller locked up nothing can reach the data through the normal interface, and to the laptop it looks as though the drive has disappeared.
On our equipment the drive failed to present normally, consistent with a controller lock-up rather than worn or damaged flash. The distinction matters enormously: a hung controller is a recoverable fault, because the data underneath is untouched and simply needs a route back to it.
Using the PC3000 we put the SSD into the manufacturer's technical mode, cleared the fault condition and read the controller's internal structures. The translator — the table that maps the logical drive onto the physical flash — had become inconsistent, which was why the drive could no longer present itself; we rebuilt it, and with that corrected the logical drive reappeared and the file system fell straight back into place. From there we imaged the drive against a copy.
We rebuilt the file system from the image and confirmed the freelancer's full set of client work opened correctly, then wrote it all to fresh media.
The drive imaged cleanly and everything was returned four working days later, with no data lost. SSDs give very little warning before this kind of failure, which is the whole argument for keeping live work synced or backed up somewhere separate — a drive that is perfectly healthy one evening can be invisible by morning.
PC3000 — imaging and recovery carried out in-house. Every job is imaged before any recovery work begins, and the original media is never written to.
Send us your device for a free diagnostic, and tell us a little about what happened — an engineer will review it and confirm your exact quote in writing before any work begins.
Recovering your data starts with getting the device to us. Pack it safely, add your contact details, and send it over — after we run a free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work begins.
Posting it in? We recommend a tracked, insured service. Prefer to drop it off? You’re welcome Monday–Friday, 9am–5:30pm — please still package the device as above.
If you need more information on our data recovery service, fill out the form with more detail about your issue and an engineer will review it and give you a custom quote.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 0117 332 1137.
Usually, yes. A dead laptop is often a motherboard fault with a perfectly healthy drive — we remove the drive and image it on the PC3000, or recover a failed drive in the clean-air environment.
From £300 plus VAT, no fix, no fee on most jobs, with a fixed written quote first.
Yes, bring the laptop so we can remove and test the drive, especially where the storage is soldered or encrypted.
Start with an instant online quote, or call and talk it through with us first. You'll have a clear, fixed price before any work begins.