Coffee to go! laptop data loss

2004 was an eventful year for the data recovery labs no least because of this particular story of data loss.

An Italian restaurateur called our offices regarding his accounts that were stored on his 2.5″ hard drive which he had been working on the morning he called in.
The client was working on the laptop at his breakfast table and finishing his final accounts for that year when he accidentally dropped his coffee cup directly over the laptop.
In his panicked state he immediately attempted switch the laptop back on to see if there were signs of life, however the laptop was dead.
After contacting a friend he removed the 2.5″ hard drive and tried connecting it via a USB caddy to a second computer with no results the laptop media was also dead.
This situation was exacerbated by the client then deciding to open up the hard drive, and in his words he explains how he felt, ‘ I was desperate and panicking, i just thought i would open the hard drive up to see if i could fix anything’, suffice to say there was nothing the client could do as the inside of the hard drive did not yield any meaningful help and looked alien to him as he had never seen inside a hard drive before.

This is the actual 2.5″ Hitachi laptop hard drive with coffee spillage.

Our labs took safe custody of the hard disk the very next day and sure enough the hard drive was covered in coffee stains.
It was immediately moved to our class 10 clean room area where engineers started to asses the situation and make decisions as to the best possible action, which in this case was specialist cleaning as dried coffee contain many elements.
Cleaning was successful then the hard drive was rebuilt with all damaged components such as head stack assembly replaced , work on the printed circuit board was the final physical part of the recovery this included replacing damaged surface mount components.
Finally the drive was ready to be imaged via our cloning team who made an exact replica of the user data area which was then scanned via a hex editor to recompile the raw image back into meaningful and launchable files, the accounts were totally recovered along with family photos and other personal data.

Opening of the hard drive by the client could have made the situation unrecoverable , especially if the media was allowed to spin for a period of time in this state.
Occasionally our labs will receive media which has been opened in no clean room conditions and invariably the data is not recoverable due to the extra damage suffered on the surface of the platters, never open hard disk drives in non clean room conditions unless you want to compound the recovery or create an unrecoverable situation.