Data Recovery Case File · Desktop Drives · The Whole Drive, Please

"Just quote for all of it": the family computer's drive, and the arithmetic of not guessing

This enquiry contained a small piece of decision-making wisdom worth promoting to a headline. The 2TB drive from the family computer had failed completely — invisible to the PC, photos unbacked-up — and its owner had old backups of some vintage, with no confident record of what had been added since. Rather than commission an archaeology project into his own backup history, he cut through: "it might be best if you just quoted for recovering all of it." It was best, and here's why.

Why "everything" was the efficient answer

The alternative he'd sensibly declined — recover only what's newer than the last backup — sounds thrifty and almost never is. It presumes the old backup is complete, healthy and known (three assumptions that fail more often than drives do), it requires reconstructing a changed-files list from a drive that can't currently be read at all, and it converts a clean engineering job into a research project billed in uncertainty. Recovery pricing follows the fault, not the gigabyte count: the head-stack that must be replaced to read one folder is the same head-stack that reads the whole drive, so "all of it" typically costs what "some of it" costs, minus the guesswork. His instinct — recover everything, then reconcile at leisure against the old backups from the comfort of a working copy — put the cheap step (comparison) after the expensive step (recovery), which is the only order that ever makes sense.

The recovery

His two-computer elimination had already done the desk-level diagnosis, and the bench agreed with his framing: the fault was in the drive, specifically its heads — the electronics answering fine while the mechanism failed the opening reads that let a drive introduce itself, which is precisely how a disk becomes wholly invisible to two healthy PCs. A donor head-stack went in under laminar airflow; the rebuilt drive came ready on the PC-3000 with its self-maintenance silenced, and Data Extractor imaged the full surface in the usual patient order. The family's 1.5TB came off the image effectively complete — the photo library verified across its years — and was delivered on new media as one whole, current set: the definitive edition, against which his old backups are now merely history.

Outcome

Full recovery, one drive, one price known up front — and a household upgraded from "backups of some vintage" to a plan: the recovered set became the master, a fresh automatic backup now shadows it, and the old partial copies retired with thanks. The generalisable point his enquiry earns: when a drive dies and your backup coverage is uncertain, don't scope the recovery around your uncertainty — recover whole, then audit from safety. Guessing at the gap risks the exact photos the guess misses, and the comparison that felt daunting against a dead drive takes an afternoon against a living copy.

Our case files are drawn from genuine enquiries received by our laboratory over the past ten years, anonymised to protect client confidentiality. Each one describes the diagnostic and recovery procedure our engineers apply to that fault, using the equipment listed.