Data Recovery Case File · Solid State & Flash · His Dad's Photos

Not detected in the PC, not detected in a caddy: a son's well-run elimination test, a dead SSD decoded — and the pricing answer he actually needed: the figure follows the fault, not the gigabytes

His enquiry was on someone else's behalf, and thorough about it. A 2TB Crucial SSD from "my old man's PC" — no longer detected, and, usefully: "have tried plugging the drive into an external caddy but it's not being picked up." The stakes: "he's got lots of photos on there he would like to recover, as he's not sure if he has them all backed up." And a practical question, honestly hedged: a cost "to recover at a guess 500GB of data — he wasn't sure how full the drive was." Three things below: credit for the caddy test, which is a genuinely valuable elimination step that told us more than he may realise; the decode of an SSD dead to two independent hosts; and a proper answer to the gigabyte question — because recovery here is priced by the fault, not the volume, and his dad's uncertainty about how full the drive was turns out not to matter at all.

The decode: what the caddy proved, and why the gigabytes don't set the price

The caddy test, honoured: trying the drive in an external caddy was exactly the right home experiment, and it did real diagnostic work. A drive undetected in one machine leaves open a whole layer of innocent explanations — that PC's port, cable, controller, or configuration. Undetected in an independent host over a different connection path, those explanations collapse: two unrelated systems agreeing the drive isn't there moves the fault firmly onto the drive itself. His test eliminated the cheap answers before the enquiry was even sent — precisely the elimination a bench would otherwise run first — and it means the assessment starts a rung up the ladder. It's the useful kind of DIY: reversible, risk-free, and informative.

The dead SSD, briefly: the fault itself follows the solid-state pattern this volume decodes in depth elsewhere: an SSD silent to every host has lost its controller or firmware — the management layer — while the photos sit, in the typical case, intact in the NAND memory behind it. The recovery works at that management layer: technological access to rouse the controller, immediate and complete imaging on any revival, and deeper routes where the controller stays down. Nothing about the two-host silence changes the hopeful anatomy; it just confirms which layer the work happens at.

The pricing question, answered properly: his "at a guess 500GB" deserves a clear answer, because it rests on a natural assumption — that recovery is priced by the gigabyte, so the guess matters. It isn't, and it doesn't. The work in this recovery is making the drive readable: the diagnosis, the controller and firmware-level access, the careful complete imaging. That work is the same whether the revived drive turns out to hold 200GB or 1.8TB — the effort lives in the fault, not the fill level — so the quote is one fixed written figure for the fault, established by the free assessment, including VAT, with no per-gigabyte meter running. His dad's uncertainty about how full the drive was is entirely fine: nobody needs to know, because the figure doesn't move with the answer. And the backup uncertainty resolves the same way — everything recoverable comes back, and comparing it against whatever backups exist happens afterwards, at leisure, with the archive safe.

On the bench

The caddy test's head start was banked: the assessment on the Atola Insight Forensic went straight to the drive-level layers his elimination had implicated, confirming a controller/firmware fault. Technological access ran against the drive's controller family, and on revival the SSD was imaged immediately and completely on the Atola TaskForce 2 — stabilised, multipass, the full drive banked in the session — with the PC-3000 Flash standing by for chip-level routes it didn't need. The photo archive stood up from the image and was verified by opening: his dad's pictures, in whatever quantity the drive actually held — which the fixed figure had never needed to know.

The outcome

The father's photos recovered and delivered verified, the enquiry's every thread answered: the caddy test honoured and built upon, the dead SSD revived at the management layer, and the pricing question resolved in his favour — one fixed written figure for the fault, indifferent to the gigabytes. Free assessment, one fixed written figure including VAT; where a chip has to be removed, 50% of parts and labour is payable upfront with the balance only on success — otherwise no recovery, no fee. For every son or daughter enquiring about a parent's drive: the caddy test is worth running, the guess about fullness is never needed — and "not sure if he has them all backed up" is exactly the sentence that makes recovery worth doing properly.

Our case files are drawn from genuine enquiries received by our laboratory over the past ten years, anonymised to protect client confidentiality. Each one describes the diagnostic and recovery procedure our engineers apply to that fault, using the equipment listed.