A Quote for Your Customer

The decode

There are three levels of injury which can occur when a hard drive is dropped, and the primary task of the first assessment is to tell them apart. Best case: the only thing damaged by the fall was either the USB connector or the bridge board. The mechanics inside the device are intact, so the work is a board-level repair followed by routine imaging. Next best case: the heads were knocked out of place or damaged, but the platters escaped. Donor heads are fitted on the head-swap bench and the device is then carefully imaged. Worst case: the heads hit the spinning platters and scored them, so recovery is partial, with the readable areas of the disk mapped around the damage. None of these scenarios can be told apart from the reported symptoms alone, but a controlled power-up and inspection can tell them apart quickly.

One piece of advice applies equally well, whether this turns out to be the best, next best or worst case. Do not apply power to the drive again outside controlled conditions. The customer should not switch it on to see if it works, and nor should anyone in the shop power it up to demonstrate the fault. If the heads are damaged, each spin-up increases the chance of damaging the drive further, turning what would have been the middle case into the worst one, and it is precisely because nobody yet knows which case this is that holding back is so valuable.

Not knowing how full the drive was barely changes the arithmetic. Imaging effort depends on the surface area that has to be read and the condition of the drive, much more than on how full the volume was, so a 3TB drive that is half empty is not half the job. What occupancy does tell you is which destination media to use and how long the extraction will take, which is useful to know but should never be guessed. And once the filesystem is visible, the volume answers the question itself.

Each trade handoff carries its own etiquette, and we keep to it deliberately. This is why we write the quote clearly enough to hand straight to the end customer: a single fixed figure, terms spelled out, and no surprise that would later embarrass the business that referred them. Unless they choose otherwise, communication goes through the business, and the work can carry their name or ours, whichever they prefer. We will never contact their customer directly, on this job or after it. A referral is a relationship of trust between three parties, and the lab's part of it is discretion.

Beyond the etiquette, the referring business also gets the technical courtesies that make referrals easy. That means a straight read on the prognosis before their customer commits, an honest statement naming exactly what was lost if platter damage limits the result, and data delivered back in a form they can pass on without needing any translation. Since photographs were the stated target, they also take priority: the image is extracted photographs first, so the thing the customer cares about is safe earliest.

On the bench

Intake was processed under trade terms, with the referring business as our only point of contact. We profiled the spin-up current on a bench power supply and inspected the mechanism on the head-swap bench once the symptoms showed the issue was internal, with a matched donor head assembly ready. The imaging process used DeepSpar Disk Imager, head-mapped, with PC-3000 UDMA behind it. Photographs were extracted first in R-Studio, and we then hash-verified the recovered set before handing it over through the referrer.

The outcome

Based on our inspection, rather than an assumption, we established how deep the impact damage went. Head-level work was carried out as indicated, and the photograph set was recovered and handed over through your business. As always, the assessment is free. Our quote is one fixed written figure, plus VAT. If we need to open a drive, 50% of parts and labour is payable upfront, with the balance only if we recover your data. Our approach comes down to one simple explanation: a dropped drive is three possible faults wearing one story, and the quote your customer sees is written only after the drive itself tells us which. Your customer remains your customer, and that discretion is part of our service.

Our case files are written up from genuine enquiries our lab has handled for customers across Sheffield and South Yorkshire, anonymised to protect client confidentiality. Each one describes the diagnostic and recovery approach our engineers apply to that fault, using the equipment listed.