Case Studies

What happens in a free data recovery assessment: a Toshiba hard drive, a dead microSD card, a snapped NVMe SSD, an erased SSD and a broken MacBook, all tested in one hour and quoted in writing.

A MacBook Air A1932 showed only a flashing folder with a question mark. The SSD was reached in target disk mode, unlocked after five wrong passwords and copied read only to a new APFS drive.

James’s Seagate 4TB portable drive, under a year old, spun but never showed up. The ROM sits in its controller chip, so we moved the chip to a donor board and copied his business files and family photos.

Sarah’s iPhone 17 Pro went swimming and had already been opened in an earlier repair attempt. A motherboard transplant moved the CPU, storage and encryption chips to a donor board, and over 200GB came back, including 14,000 photos and 3,000 videos.

A Newcastle photographer’s 1TB WD My Passport started clicking with 400GB of client shoots on it. The failed heads were replaced from a matched donor drive in a laminar flow cabinet, and every file came back in one day.

Margaret’s 2011 iMac A1311 would not turn on. The motherboard was dead, but the data was on a removable hard drive. We removed the glued screen, copied the drive on a PC-3000 and recovered 110GB, including the entire iPhoto library.

An iMac Fusion Drive case study: the 128GB Apple SSD was not detected through a USB adapter, but was read over PCI Express, cloned despite bad sectors from age, and the full Fusion volume came back in Disk Utility. The customer had first tried a cheaper option that recovered nothing.

A clicking WD My Book held 20 years of family photos. Head 0 was torn off and the circuit board had failed too. Donor heads and a ROM chip transfer brought back 440GB.

A 2023 MacBook Pro 16-inch M2 Pro went to a black screen months after a liquid spill. One blown capacitor was found with a thermal camera and replaced, and 300GB, over 600,000 files, was recovered to a new USB hard drive.