There is "a very crucial folder" on a damaged hard drive, and progression on a degree depends on it. He had already been quoted somewhere, found it "way too high", said plainly that he does "not want to pay such money", and asked for "a reasonable price". That is a fair request, and the only honest way to answer it is to find out what is actually wrong first. A drive described as damaged might have a broken filing structure, which is one sort of job, or a mechanical fault, which is quite another, and the two are hundreds of pounds apart. So it gets examined, the fault gets named, and a single written figure follows — after which he decides, with the number in front of him rather than behind him.
| Media | A damaged hard drive holding a folder of coursework needed for a university progression deadline. |
| Reported situation | Damaged hard drive · one crucial coursework folder · university deadline pending · previous quote found unaffordable · a clear and reasonable price sought. |
| Fault class | To be established — a drive called damaged may be logically damaged (filesystem, corruption) or physically damaged (mechanical, electrical), and which of the two it is sets both the method and the figure. The folder is reached by imaging the drive and recovering from the copy. |
| Equipment used | Read through a hardware write-blocker, PC-3000 UDMA driving it, drive health and filesystem examined to separate a logical fault from a physical one · opened under a laminar-flow hood in clean air only if a mechanical fault had been found · imaged using DeepSpar, the filesystem taken apart in R-Studio, the coursework folder located, opened to check it, and written to fresh media. |
'Damaged' is a word that covers a very wide range of bills. It might mean a filing structure that has come apart after an interrupted write, which is a straightforward job on healthy hardware. It might mean heads that no longer read, which brings clean-air work, donor parts and a substantially larger number into it. Nobody can tell the two apart from a description, which is why quoting from one is guesswork dressed as a service.
So the examination comes first and it costs nothing. Inside 2 working days of the drive arriving we know which of those two worlds we are in, and the figure that follows is fixed, written down, and does not move afterwards however awkward the job turns out to be. If it is logical work, it runs on no fix, no fee: if the coursework does not come back, there is nothing to pay. If it turns out to be mechanical, the terms change and we say so before, not after — half the quote up front against parts and bench time, the balance only on success.
The deadline gets handled the practical way. The whole drive is imaged, because working from a copy is the only safe way to do anything, but the folder he actually needs is found and validated first so that it can be sent on while the rest is still being combed through. It is not a trick and it is not an upsell tier; it is simply the order the work is done in when somebody has a date to meet.
It went on PC-3000 UDMA with a write-blocker wired in line so that nothing could be written to it while its health and filesystem were examined, and that examination is what separated a logical fault from a physical one before any price was named. It imaged cleanly on DeepSpar. The filesystem was taken apart in R-Studio from the image, the coursework folder located, and the documents inside it opened to confirm they were the current versions and not fragments, before the lot went onto fresh media.
Fault established, drive imaged, coursework folder recovered and checked, with a working day to spare. The diagnostic cost nothing; the figure that followed was fixed, written and inclusive of VAT for the fault as found. This one resolved as logical work, so it ran on no fix, no fee — had the folder not come back, there would have been no invoice. The point worth taking from it is not that recovery is cheap, because it is not, but that you are entitled to know the number before you commit to it.
Stop using the drive and stop running software at it, because a folder that still exists this morning can be overwritten by a recovery tool saving its results back onto the same disk this afternoon. Then get it examined rather than quoted. A drive described as damaged might have a broken filing structure or a mechanical fault, and those are entirely different pieces of work at entirely different prices, so any figure offered before somebody has looked is a guess you would be funding. Ask for a free examination, a named fault and one fixed written figure, and mention the deadline when you ring — the folder you actually need can be found and checked first while the rest of the drive is still being worked through.
Every case file here is written up from a real enquiry handled for households and businesses across Norwich and Norfolk, anonymised so that nobody is identifiable. Each sets out the reasoning behind the diagnosis and the method used on that particular fault, with the equipment named.
The drive is fine and the index is not — which is a filing problem, and filing problems are rebuilt from a copy
Windows cannot start, which is a problem for the laptop rather than for the photographs on its drive
Windows is describing its own confusion, not the state of your files — and the offer to format is the trap
Diagnosis costs nothing and takes up to 2 working days from arrival, the quote is fixed in writing, and logical work runs no fix, no fee — start online or ring the freephone.