Some symptoms mean copy your files this week. Others mean stop touching the machine now. Treating the second kind like the first is how most recoverable drives become expensive ones.
Mechanical symptoms escalate with every minute of use. Logical and performance symptoms give you time. Sorting a symptom into the right bucket is the whole decision.
Clicking or ticking — the heads cannot find servo data. Grinding or scraping — heads contacting the platter, causing permanent surface damage with every rotation. Beeping — usually a seized motor or stiction, the drive trying and failing to spin. Burning smell or visible damage after a surge or spill.
All four are physical, none improve with another attempt, and each additional power-on measurably reduces what can be recovered. The correct action is to disconnect and stop — not to run diagnostics, not to attempt one more copy.
Files that fail to open or copy, especially with CRC errors. Growing slowness — particularly transfers that stall at the same point, which is the drive retrying unreadable sectors many times before giving up. Freezes and blue screens that cluster around disk activity. Files or folders disappearing, or names turning to gibberish. SMART warnings from Windows or a monitoring tool.
These indicate bad sectors or file-system damage on a drive that is still fundamentally working. That is your window: copy the irreplaceable material to another drive now, starting with what you would most regret losing, then replace the disk. Don’t run a full surface scan first — that reads every sector on a drive already telling you it is struggling.
A slow computer on its own is usually software, a full disk, or an ageing machine rather than a failing drive — check whether the slowness correlates with disk activity before assuming. An external that is not detected is more often a cable, port or bridge board than a dead disk; try a different cable first, it costs nothing. One corrupt file after a crash or bad ejection is usually file-system damage rather than hardware, particularly if everything else reads normally.
If you have a working but suspect drive, copy by value rather than alphabetically: the irreplaceable things first, the reinstallable things never. Copy to a different physical drive, not a folder on the same one. Then stop using the drive — a disk that has started retiring sectors will keep doing so, and every hour of use spends reads you may want later.
Where the drive has already failed, recovery is from £300 +VAT after a free 48-hour diagnostic and a written quote, and most jobs are no fix, no fee.
They split into two groups. Urgent: clicking, ticking, grinding, beeping, or a burning smell — power off immediately. Less urgent but real: files failing to open, transfers stalling, freezes clustered around disk activity, files vanishing, and SMART warnings — copy your data off today.
No — power it off instead. A backup from a mechanically failing drive takes hours of the exact stress that widens the damage, and often does not finish. Have it assessed rather than spending the remaining reads on a copy that may fail partway.
Not necessarily, and usually not. Slowness on its own is more often software, a full disk or an ageing machine. The drive-related pattern is more specific: transfers that stall at the same point, freezes tied to disk activity, and files that fail to open.
Often not. On externals the cable, port or USB bridge board fails at least as often as the disk. Try a different cable and a different port before assuming the worst — but if it clicks or grinds, stop and disconnect it.
A single drive is from £300 plus VAT, fixed in a written quote after a free 48-hour diagnostic. Most jobs are no fix, no fee; clean-air and donor-part work carries a 50% deposit with the balance due only on success.