Devices · drives that travel about
One drive is £300 + VAT, with the free look settling that figure first. Before either, there are two suspects. Take the shell apart and you find a plain hard disk joined to the USB socket by a small bridge board. Bridges give out in their own right, and most of them keep the encryption keys as well, which is why both the unit and the cable have to arrive here. Add to that twelve months of living in a rucksack, on and off the Tube. Two candidates, and separating them is where the work on a London external drive begins.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
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| What is going on | The usual reason for it | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| The drive will not open, and Windows suggests formatting it | The cable parted during a write, so the volume shows RAW while everything beneath it stands | Shut it down, then pull the cable |
| Windows says USB device not recognized and lists nothing | Nothing on the far side of that socket is replying — board or drive | Try one other cable, then stop trying |
| Windows shows nothing but Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) | The unit gives Windows no device identity whatever | A bridge that has failed. Bench work now |
| Data error (cyclic redundancy check) as soon as you open it | The disk behind the board is failing sectors | Take the power off and keep it off |
| Disk Management calls it RAW, or Not Initialized | There is no partition table Windows can read, so it offers to wipe it | Decline it. Initialising is what ends these. |
| Every port you try gives a malfunctioning USB device warning | Either the 5V rail in the shell has failed, or the bridge has | Boards stop long before platters do |
A case number goes on it the day the parcel lands, and an engineer settles what has truly failed before anything else happens — free of charge, and first in the order of work. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.
Every one of these starts with the same question: shell or drive? Externals turn up unresponsive here constantly — LaCie and Iomega above all — and the disk behind the stopped board is very often perfectly sound.
Nobody switched this on: it was doing it when it left the factory. All that is in question is where. On portables the encrypting is normally the bridge's work, so the keys land on that little board rather than anywhere near the platters. Lift them off the board and what read as noise becomes your folder tree again.
Nothing is attempted before a sector-by-sector copy exists, made on a hardware imager; everything after that happens to the copy, and your drive is not touched again. Recovered files go home on fresh media with the return postage settled here. A Bromley surveyor with one set of site photographs and a family archive out of a Hammersmith loft get exactly the same treatment.
What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge whatever. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have read those files on a machine of your own.
Worth knowing: SanDisk Extreme portables in the 2TB and 4TB sizes were shedding files silently across 2023. Class actions followed in the United States, and the firmware update issued partway through settled little. A drive out of that family behaving strangely wants imaging now, not next month.
A tick started in the Passport with nine days left on the deadline. Donor heads were matched and fitted, then the imaging pass was deliberately held at a low speed. Units of this kind keep their encryption keys on the bridge board, not on the platters, and that is where the keys were read. Chapters, references and figures were home with a week in hand.
No. It travels exactly as it is, cable and all. On a portable, it is generally the USB board that does the encrypting, not the drive itself, so a healthy disk arriving on its own is nothing but ciphertext to us. In any event the shipping form asks for externals in their own enclosures.
Never. That prompt says only that Windows cannot make out the file system; about the files themselves it says nothing at all. Agree to it and the structures we would rebuild from are overwritten.
Removals are rough treatment. The drive spends hours vibrating in a van, gets handled a great deal at each end, and finishes up somewhere at a different temperature. Mechanisms that were already marginal often decline to start again after that. It is one of the commoner stories we get.
Nearly always. Three things decide the answer: the drive, the small board bolted to its underside, and whether the bridge chip is healthy enough to give up the keys. The condition of the outer shell hardly matters.
Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the drive switched off.