Although you can see the name on the top of many laptops and their lids (the “badge”), that does not necessarily mean it is that brand’s internal hard drive. Toshiba is one of the largest producers of 2.5-inch drives for major brands like Dell, HP & Acer.
A repair service wants to send back a functional laptop, usually by replacing the existing hard drive. A recovery service wants to give you access to your files. These two processes have to happen in a certain order. First you have to get your files off the failing hard drive. Then you replace it.
If your laptop freezes, throws out disk error messages or runs very slowly and you cannot afford to lose any of this information then follow these steps: image the data, then repair the laptop. A repair shop is not doing anything wrong when they put in a brand-new hard drive (that’s how they would repair your laptop); however if the original drive has been pulled from your laptop, left sitting around (possibly turned back on) while being diagnosed it is now even farther along in failure than it was when you sent it in.
It’s also good news in terms of recovery: if the laptop will still boot and the drive still works, then you don’t even need a data recovery lab. Get your files off onto an external hard drive, or upload them to a cloud-based storage service today. This is by far the least expensive method of recovery out there, but it can stop being available without warning!
Desktop hard drives have a much easier time of things when compared with laptops. Laptops are often dropped, jostled around, and put to sleep over their entire lifetimes. And as such, laptop hard drive failures tend to be mechanical in nature. For example, a laptop drive can experience a “head crash” while running, where the heads literally scrape against the platters (a common result of a drop) and start making a “clicking” or “scraping” sound. In this case, you should immediately shut down the computer rather than attempting to restart it again hoping that the problem may resolve on its own.
The other common failure type we see is firmware problems. Drive spins normally; looks and sounds like it’s working just fine; yet drive is never seen by BIOS/OS or has reported incorrect capacity. This indicates a problem with the service area, rather than the actual mechanisms involved. These types of issues are generally some of the easiest to recover from, provided the drive wasn’t cycled through power cycles repeatedly during troubleshooting efforts.
The USB bridges inside Toshiba’s Canvio portable devices fail at least as often as the drives, just like all other external devices do. It is highly likely therefore that an externally faulty device (that is silent or completely invisible) has a fully functioning drive inside it. Please send the entire device (don’t pull out the hard drive), and if it has suffered damage by being dropped and now makes clicking noises, simply disconnect it, then ignore it.
A single Toshiba drive, regardless of whether it was taken from a laptop, or is inside a Toshiba Canvio portable device, costs from £300 +VAT after receiving a free 48-hour diagnostic and a written quotation. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. When sending us the drive please try to send it separately to the rest of the laptop; it is cheaper and easier to dispatch. Additionally, most local computer shops will be able to remove it from your laptop quickly if you prefer not to attempt to do this yourself. All external enclosures need to be sent complete.
Quite possibly, regardless of what the label says. Toshiba is a leading provider of 2.5-inch drives to numerous other companies; therefore, laptops produced by Dell, HP, Acer and other suppliers may also be equipped with Toshiba mechanisms. The method of recovering the data is unaffected; however, it explains the difference in naming convention.
That will depend upon what you want returned. Repair shops usually return an operational laptop by installing a replacement hard disk (and re-installing Windows) that will restore functionality but will not recover your files. If the data matters, first have the data recovered then get the laptop restored.
Generally yes, but do not continue to use it. Clicking can mean the heads are either wearing out or physically touching the platters, as well as causing additional damage with every restart. This is typically head repair done with donor parts; the successfulness of this process is very much dependent upon how many times it has been used since clicking began.
Often not. The Canvio’s hard drive is inside an enclosure with a USB interface board. That board can fail at least as frequently as the actual hard drive itself. We recommend using a different cable and trying a different port on your computer. If there still isn’t improvement, please consider sending the entire device, unopened, to us.
Prices start at £300 +VAT for the cost of recovering a single drive (whether from a laptop or from a Canvio enclosure). Once we have completed the initial free 48-hour diagnostic process, we will provide a fixed written quote outlining what you will be charged for the costs associated with recovering your data. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data.