No hardware fault at all - a corrupted partition table made a healthy drive look empty. Rebuilt and recovered.
A customer's PC booted one day to a message that the drive needed formatting, and what had been a full disk of files now showed as empty, unallocated space. Understandably they feared the worst — but a drive that suddenly appears empty is very often not a hardware failure at all. In this case the drive was mechanically perfect; the fault was logical. The partition table, the small structure that tells Windows where each partition begins and ends, had become corrupted, leaving the files completely intact but invisible to the operating system.
On our equipment the drive read cleanly with no mechanical issues, confirming a logical rather than physical problem. When a partition table is damaged, the data itself is usually untouched — the map to it has simply been lost. That is a far more hopeful situation than it looks from the formatting prompt, provided nothing is written to the drive in the meantime.
Even with a perfectly healthy drive we never work on the original. We took a full image on the PC3000, then worked entirely on the copy: scanning it to locate the true start of the file system, rebuilding the partition structure and repairing the file-system records so the data could be read back in place. Because nothing had actually been overwritten — the customer had wisely stopped using the machine — it was all recoverable.
With the partition rebuilt, the file system mounted exactly as it had before. We confirmed the customer's documents, photos and other files opened correctly, then wrote everything to fresh media.
The drive's full contents came back within three working days. The key lesson, and one we repeat often: if a drive suddenly asks to be formatted or shows up empty, don't format it and stop using it — the data is frequently still there, and continuing to write to the drive is the one thing that can genuinely lose it.
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 — from failed drives recovered in the clean-air environment to logical faults such as a corrupt partition table rebuilt from an image. We never write to the original drive.
From £300 plus VAT, no fix, no fee on most jobs, with a fixed quote before any work.
Do not format it, and stop using the PC. The data is usually intact; formatting or continued use is what risks losing 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.