Fire, smoke, and heat damage
Summary
The drive or computer has been in a fire or subjected to smoke and/or heat-damage from a fire. Often, while the fire is being put out, the drive is additionally subjected to liquid damage and is often knocked over too.
The Situation
Due to a fire, smoke or heat, your drive or computer has become damaged and inaccessible. In cases like this, we don’t recommend even trying to boot the drive, as sometimes this can make things worse. Depending on how bad the heat was and how long it was subjected to the fire, the drive may not be in that bad of condition, but sometimes the damage can be catastrophic and beyond the ability to recover. The first thing to go in the heat of a fire is often the PCB, but that, we can usually work around. With enough heat and enough time, a fire and/or infiltrating smoke can, however, ruin the platter surfaces beyond recoverability. Often, unfortunately and seemingly-ironically, a drive that has been through a fire is not actually damaged as much by the fire, as it is by the attempts at putting out the fire, having been blasted down and soaked with liquid or chemicals, knocked around, and often subjected to physical trauma.
The Good News
IT Data Recovery has many times recovered data from drives that looked absolutely horrible on the outside after having been through fires, including from some drives that we had to physically cut, Dremel, and saw out of melted computers. As long as the platters aren’t damaged too badly, we still usually recover them. Often, insurance may cover a certain extent of the recovery costs, so that should be checked and not overlooked. As always, the evaluation on individual drives is free, so you have nothing to lose by letting us examine the extent of the damage caused by the fire and potential other damage the drive has suffered in the situation.
The Solution
If your drive has been through a fire, and especially if it has been subjected to liquid as the fire was put out, don’t waste time. The damaged caused by liquid infiltration to a drive can quickly worsen over time.