Fire Damage
There are fires, and then there are FIRES.
Last month we recovered the data from a fire damaged hard drive for Greater Manchester Police that was part of a murder investigation. It seems the fire was an attempt to destroy evidence, fortunately the evidence we recovered from the hard drive means the investigation can proceed. We used our Advanced Data Recovery service to successfully recover the data from this drive.
However, that’s not the case with the example to the left.
Click on the top picture and you’ll see a computer tower taken from the remains of a gutted warehouse. As you can see, nearly all the cabling has burnt away and all that remains are the metal chassis parts.
The bottom picture (also clickable) is a close up of the hard drive from the same computer. We’ve removed the top lid so you can see inside the disk. The circular disks in the middle of the picture are the disk’s platter surfaces – these are the parts of the hard drive where your data is stored. To the left of the platter is an emptyish space. What is usually located here are the disk’s read / write heads – the parts of the drive that write data to and read data from the platter surfaces. As you can see in this case, they’ve more or less melted.
It is not possible to recover any data from hard disks in this condition.