The disk inside was perfect - the failure was the enclosure's encrypting interface board. Here's how we read past it.
A video editor's LaCie d2 stopped appearing on every machine they connected it to. There was no clicking, no obvious mechanical noise — it simply wasn't recognised. That pattern very often points not at the disk inside but at the bridge board in the enclosure, the small interface that converts the drive's native connection to USB. When that board fails, a perfectly healthy disk becomes invisible.
We shelled the bare drive out of the enclosure and connected it directly to our equipment, where it span up and read perfectly — confirming the disk was fine and the bridge had died. But there was a catch that often catches people out: like many external drives, the LaCie bridge encrypts the data on the fly as it passes through. Read the bare disk directly and you get nothing but noise, because the data only makes sense once it has been decoded by the bridge.
The solution was to identify the exact encryption scheme the bridge used and apply it ourselves during imaging, so the data came back in readable form rather than as scrambled bytes. We took the image on the PC3000 with the drive hardware write-protected throughout, ensuring the original was never altered while we worked. With the decoding applied, the file system appeared exactly as it should.
We rebuilt the file system from the decoded image, confirmed the editor's projects, footage and exports opened correctly, and copied everything onto a fresh drive.
Every edit, project file and export was returned five working days from drop-off, with the original disk never written to. The case is a useful reminder that with hardware-encrypted external drives the enclosure is part of the data path, not just a caddy — which is one more reason to keep an independent backup rather than relying on a single sealed unit.
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.
Yes. We take the bare drive out of its enclosure and recover it directly, handling head damage in the clean-air environment and any hardware encryption from the enclosure's bridge.
From £300 plus VAT, no fix, no fee on most jobs, with a fixed quote up front.
Stop powering it. A dropped drive that clicks or will not spin is damaged mechanically, so bring it in rather than retrying it.
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.