Case Study
A boot error. A financial database on the line.
A Seagate BarraCuda 1TB, 7200rpm hard drive holding a client's company financial database stopped booting overnight. Diagnosis found a fried circuit board, not a lost drive — here is what it took to put it right.
The case
A boot error, and the accounts stopped opening.
The drive: a Seagate BarraCuda, 1TB capacity, 7200rpm — the internal hard drive in a client's office computer, and the only copy of the company's financial database.
The client only found out something was wrong when they tried to start the computer and were met with a boot error. The old Seagate drive inside it had failed outright.
Diagnosis in our Belfast laboratory identified the cause: a fried PCB — the circuit board that controls power delivery and basic drive function. With a PCB fault, the platters holding the data are frequently untouched; the fault sits on the board, not the media. That made this a repair-and-recover case rather than a data-loss one, and work began straight away.
The outcome
Board replaced, database back, inside two days.
The fix was a PCB replacement, quoted at a fixed £360 including VAT before any work went ahead. The whole job — diagnosis, board replacement and recovery — took less than 48 hours.
A fried PCB is one of the more straightforward failures a hard drive can suffer, but it is not a job for a mismatched donor board bought online: get it wrong and a recoverable drive becomes an unrecoverable one. Cases like this are also why we say the same thing to every client with a dead drive — stop, don't keep trying to power it on, and get a proper diagnosis before anything else touches it. See how we approach hard drive data recovery generally, or get a straight assessment of your own drive.
Power it down, describe what happened, and get a straight answer on what's recoverable and what it will cost — before any work begins.