The Job That Was Turned Down

Reading the fault

Water damage on its own is not the problem. A board that has been wet is cleaned, dried and inspected, and where the storage is a separate part it is then read on its own regardless of whether the machine will ever run again. That is ordinary work. What decides whether it can be done is the architecture of the machine rather than the spill.

On this generation the storage is not a component you can remove. The flash is soldered directly to the mainboard and the controller that manages it lives inside the main processor rather than on the storage itself. There is no disk, no caddy and no adapter. Lifting the chips off is physically possible and pointless, because what comes off them is encrypted material that only that particular processor can turn back into files.

The encryption is the part that closes the door. The key is generated and kept inside the processor's secure area and never leaves it, which is a good design and the reason a stolen machine is not a data breach. It also means a laboratory holding the memory chips and not the working processor has nothing but noise. Any firm that offers to recover from a machine like this by lifting the chips is describing something that does not work.

Saying so at the enquiry is the whole point of the enquiry. The office could have posted it, waited, and been told the same thing a week later with a machine in transit and nothing gained. Storage soldered to a mainboard, which is how recent Apple laptops and a good many thin ultrabooks are built, sits outside what this lab takes in, and so does anything that cannot be unplugged and sent on its own. Phones and tablets are outside it for the same reasons and are never accepted.

Bench work

Nothing came to the bench. The office sent two photographs of the underside of the board and the serial number off the case, which was enough to confirm both the model and that the storage was soldered rather than removable.

What they were told instead took about ten minutes on the telephone. Do not switch it on and do not put it on charge, because current through a wet board is what turns a cleanable machine into a corroded one. Take it to a repair firm that does board-level liquid work rather than a general shop, because the only realistic route to that data is through the machine itself: if the board can be brought back for long enough to start, the processor with the key in it does the decryption and the material copies off normally. And check what already exists elsewhere before spending anything at all.

What went back

Nothing was charged, because nothing was done and no examination was needed to know the answer. That is the ordinary handling of a job that sits outside what can be taken in: it is turned down at the enquiry rather than after a parcel has been sent and a diagnostic has been run on something nobody can help with.

The end of it was better than expected. A backup disk was found in a cupboard in the same office, last used about five weeks earlier, which covered everything except the current month. The machine went to a board-level repair specialist and came back working a fortnight later, at which point the missing five weeks copied off in the usual way.

Each of these is a real enquiry, taken from a household or a business somewhere in Leicester or the surrounding county, with the name of the customer, the firm and anything else that would identify them taken out. What is left is the reasoning: what turned up, what had actually failed inside it, the method that fault required and the equipment it was worked on. One of the thirty-six is a job that was refused, and it belongs here every bit as much as the successes do.