Case Study — Dell
A dead Seagate drive, a Dell warranty repair, and a 24-hour window.
A Dell Inspiron 15 5000 Series i7 arrived with a failed 2TB Seagate hard drive — and a Dell warranty repair already booked. Here's how both were resolved without losing the data or the warranty.
The case
A warranty repair that couldn't wait.
Dell would replace the drive under warranty. Nobody but us was going to get the data off it first.
A Dell Inspiron 15 5000 Series, running an i7 and a 2TB Seagate hard drive, came in with a drive that had failed. The customer had already been in touch with Dell, who agreed to replace the hard drive under warranty with a 48-hour on-site repair in Belfast — but a warranty swap only fixes the hardware. It does nothing for the data sitting on the failed drive.
That set a hard deadline. To make the Dell repair slot, the laptop needed its original, faulty hard drive back inside it, untouched by anyone else, in time for the technician's visit. We had the laptop 24 hours ahead of that appointment to get the data off it and the drive back in.
The process
Recovering the data, then putting the fault back.
- 01
Drive removed and assessed
The 2TB Seagate 2.5" hard drive was taken out of the Inspiron as soon as it arrived. It had a large number of bad sectors across the platters.
- 02
Imaged around the damage
Recovery ran directly against the failing drive, working around the bad sectors rather than through them, to pull off as much readable data as possible before anything degraded further.
- 03
98% recovered in 12 hours
Despite the extent of the bad sectors, the recovery reached a 98% success rate — completed in 12 hours to leave room either side of the deadline.
- 04
Faulty drive refitted
With the data safely off it, the original — still faulty — Seagate drive was put straight back into the Inspiron, exactly as Dell's warranty process required.
The outcome
New drive from Dell, old data restored.
The laptop went back to Dell the next day with its original faulty drive still in place, and the on-site engineer replaced it under warranty as planned. The customer then brought the Inspiron back to us, and the 98% of recovered data was copied across onto the new drive.
The outcome: a working laptop on a new hard drive, its previous data intact, and a Dell warranty that was never put at risk by anyone opening the machine outside of Dell's own process.
Work of this kind — recovering data to a fixed deadline so a manufacturer warranty repair can go ahead untouched — carries a premium for the turnaround involved. This job, completed in 12 hours against a 24-hour window, came to £350 including VAT.
If a manufacturer repair is already on the calendar, don't let it cost you the data. Get the drive imaged first — even against a tight deadline.