Case Study
A dropped MacBook Pro. A full recovery.
A 2011 MacBook Pro arrived in our Belfast laboratory with a Seagate hard drive that had failed after a heavy drop. Here's what we found, and how it came back.
What happened
A hard fall, a failed drive.
The client's 2011 MacBook Pro had been dropped heavily, and the internal Seagate hard drive stopped working as a result.
It doesn't take much. Even a small fall can put 50g or more of shock force through a laptop hard drive — and with the platters inside spinning at 5,000–7,200rpm at the moment of impact, that's usually enough to cause the kind of mechanical damage that took this drive down.
Once we had the machine open and the drive accessible, we also found the practical side effects of five years without an internal clean in a pet-owning household: a fair amount of dust built up around the drive bay.
The work
Recovered, then cloned to SSD.
- 01
Diagnosis & fixed quote
The Seagate drive was assessed and the failure confirmed as impact damage. We quoted £140 to recover the data before any recovery work began.
- 02
Recovery & clone
All the data was recovered from the failed drive and cloned onto a brand new solid-state drive fitted in place of the original mechanical drive. The cloning and the new SSD were costed separately from the recovery itself.
The outcome
Every file back, and a faster Mac.
Total cost for the complete job — data recovery, the new SSD, and fitting — came to £260 including VAT.
The client got every file back from the failed Seagate drive, and the MacBook itself came back faster than before: booting in under 30 seconds on its new SSD, instead of relying on the original mechanical drive that had failed it.
A knock that stops a hard drive spinning is one of the most recoverable failures we see — provided the drive isn't powered on again afterwards. Get a fixed quote before any work starts.