Every case file here is a real job off our own bench: what arrived, what had failed, how the recovery ran, and what went home. Eleven files are live below, rewritten properly from the bench archive — and more join them as the archive gives them up.
A factory’s 12-drive Inspur RAID 10, throwing I/O errors as bad sectors crept across mirrored disks. Twelve gentle images on the DeepSpar, a virtual rebuild from copies.
A design studio initialised its Synology by accident. Initialising writes a new empty label but doesn’t scrub the disks — the old array was rebuilt from images and the portfolio recovered.
A church’s Seagate BarraCuda beeped and wouldn’t spin — a seized spindle. Platters transferred to a donor under a laminar-flow hood, then imaged on the DeepSpar.
A MacBook Pro SSD wouldn’t mount — First Aid failed, the Apple Store declined it. Corrupt APFS, not a dead SSD: imaged, the file system rebuilt on the copy, thesis recovered.
A SanDisk USB pulled out mid-write read as RAW and Windows demanded a format. The files sat untouched behind a corrupt FAT — imaged, index rebuilt, a care home’s records home.
An accountant’s iMac, 52 client account sets, and a dead PCB — not a dead disk. A donor board with the original ROM adaptives moved across on the PC-3000.
Two of four disks had already failed SMART when the owner hit rebuild. Imaged, virtually reassembled, parity recoded — the office file server came back whole.
An 8-disk HP RAID 5, a hot spare that never engaged, and three dying disks. Platter swaps under a laminar-flow hood, then a virtual rebuild returned 2TB for a factory of 100.
A finance laptop on the BitLocker screen with a dying NVMe below it. Imaged encrypted first, key pulled from the company’s own Entra ID escrow, then decrypted from the image.
A Windows update, a blue screen demanding a key she had never seen, and a failing drive underneath. The key had been in her Microsoft account all along.
Company device, company policy, scope agreed in writing. USB history, deleted files carved from free space, a wiping tool installed days before resignation — and the requests we refused.
Instructed through her solicitor, on the jointly-owned PC, to an agreed scope. We said no to his phone and his private accounts — and her case was stronger for it.
Not encryption: corrupted NTFS permissions. Rebuilt on the image rather than forced on the original, and two years of coursework came back with folders intact.
The one fault where we can’t promise an outcome. Overwritten data is gone — but flash rarely overwrites neatly, and most of the shoot was carved back by signature.
No client is ever identifiable — devices, faults and outcomes are real; names and details that could point at a person are not published. Each file covers the same ground: the arrival story, the diagnosis in plain language, the bench work that followed, and the honest result including anything that couldn’t be saved. Between them they answer the question every visitor is really asking — ‘has this lab seen a failure like mine?’ — and for a bench with 25 years behind it, the answer is very nearly always yes. Beyond the files above, the process page shows how every one of them ran, and the reviews show how they ended.