Anonymised, technically honest write-ups of real recovery patterns from the bench — what arrived, what had actually failed, what the fix took and what went home. Read them as previews: if your situation is on this page, so is your likely outcome.
A laptop drive announcing head failure, stopped on the third click — donor heads, one gentle image, a decade of family life returned.
// arraysA Paisley firm’s server, one rebuild too brave — every member imaged, the pre-rebuild state solved virtually, payroll ran on Monday.
// nasVolume gone, shares vanished, reset almost pressed — SHR rebuilt from images and the btrfs snapshots that saved a fortnight’s work.
// appleA thesis, a Fusion pair broken mid-update — both halves imaged, the marriage remade in software, submitted on time.
// photoA card error the morning after — shooting stopped in time, the frames carved back whole, every dance intact.
// flashSheared at the port in an EK library — the NAND read directly past the break, four years of research off one black chip.
// externalSpinning happily, invisible to every laptop in the house — corrupted drive firmware rebuilt on the bench, five years of teaching files imaged home.
// externalThat beep is the motor straining against stuck heads. Freed under the hood, donor heads fitted, and a studio’s rebrand shipped on time.
// externalAn architecture practice’s archive, spinning but absent from every machine — firmware repaired, weak sectors mapped, every DWG verified home.
// ssdA solicitor’s SanDisk Extreme slowing to a stop — worn NAND imaged with the gentlest settings, exFAT rebuilt on the copy, 99% back under NDA.
// raid · forensicAn ex-employee deleted the RAID 5 volume; the stripes remembered. Reassembled virtually, with a documented forensic report fit for the solicitors.
// server · vmwareA datastore lost to a rebuild against a stale member — geometry solved from images, both VMDKs extracted, both machines booting by Friday.
// nasA boot-looping ReadyNAS, a RAID 0 pair, and a decade of shoots — the box retired, the stripes interleaved from images, everything home.
// nasThree failed rebuilds onto the wrong replacement, then the volume dropped — recovered whole from a careful image of the surviving disk.
Details are anonymised and identifying specifics changed; the technical patterns are exactly as the bench sees them, week in, week out. No case file is a guarantee — every drive earns its own diagnosis — but if you recognise your symptom above, you’re reading the most likely shape of your own job, including the part where it works out.
The free diagnostic writes the first page: what failed, what’s recoverable, the fixed figure. Glasgow recovery case files all end the same way — with the data going home.