Virtually all hard disk failures are either mechanical (the hardware), electronic (the circuitry), firmware (the drive’s own software), or logical (your files). The type determines what you should do next, where you go and how much it will cost, as well as if your drive is deteriorating while you read this. There is only one of the four categories that worsens when you apply power and that is the one that also produces noise. If your external hard drive resides in a USB enclosure, begin by reading how to recover an external hard drive.
Beep, click, tick, grind... All refer to the mechanical parts of the drive. Every second you leave this turned on, the damage becomes much worse. More than anything else you could possibly do (cable type, software used, and even which lab you go to), this decision has the most impact on whether or not you recover your data.
Nearly all hard drive failures fall under one of these categories, and the category will determine how we can help you, the cost and how urgent it is.
Some of our customers send their failed hard drives in from computers they purchased within the past year. Others are sending in hard drives that are many years older than some of the software running today.
We work with every type of hard drive available: SATA, SAS, IDE and PATA, SCSI and 2.5-inch laptop hard drives to 3.5-inch desktop and enterprise hard drives. All of the major manufacturers are also covered, including Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, Hitachi and HGST, Samsung, Maxtor, Fujitsu and the older brands that came before them.
Elderly drives are a genuine speciality (i.e., they aren’t just afterthoughts). Recovery of a twenty-year-old Maxtor or an IDE drive that has been in some machine long since scrapped will present their own challenges (donor availability is limited); however, the process of recovery is very well understood. Before you write off your old drive as being too old to be worth recovering, it is worth asking us. See also hard drive advantages and disadvantages.
The entire methodology relies on the fact that there may be no more than one correct read left in a bad drive; therefore, this last read is used to create a replica of the drive.
Each type of failure (mechanical, electronic, firmware and logical) has to be categorised first in order to determine how to treat it.
Donor heads are fitted, the board is repaired with its original ROM adaptives transferred over and/or service area work is performed, just enough to get the drive back into a readable state as opposed to making it useable again.
Cloning occurs using hardware capable of reading failing media and will apply per-head timeouts if the sector cannot be read. Any unreadable sectors are logged instead of being allowed to cause the cloning process to hang.
File system recovery, extraction and carving occur in relation to the cloned version of the file system. This means we do not write to the original.
The recovered information is then tested through the application in which it was created (e.g., Word), so that any unreadable information will be identified by name as opposed to being presented back to you as an unopenable file.
There are no additional charges for a single drive regardless of what problem has been identified.
Prices start at £300 +VAT for one hard disk (internal/external/laptop), confirmed in a written quote after the 48-hour free diagnostic. If the hard disk is part of a RAID, NAS, or server, the initial price will begin at £500 +VAT. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. For all “donor part” work there is a 50% payment required upon ordering and the remaining amount is due only once your data has been recovered.
Post just the bare hard drive instead of posting the entire PC when you can (less expensive to ship, and faster to begin). The external enclosures are the exceptions to this rule. Please send these as the full unit, along with the enclosure. Complete write-ups: Hitachi IDE Recovery: A Factory Machine Cloned, Maxtor DiamondMax Recovery: Drive Running Hot, and a Samsung SpinPoint identifying as nonsense.
Ship your drive to us with a brief description of the fault so we may do a complimentary evaluation. The engineer will evaluate your drive and confirm the exact quote in writing before he begins working on your drive.
Before dropping off or posting your device please request a quotation either by telephone or using our quotation form. The first step to recover your data is to get the device to us. Please ensure that you pack the device securely, include your contact information and then forward it to us. Once we have completed the free diagnostic of your device we will provide you with your exact price in writing prior to commencing any further work.
Posting it? We would suggest using a tracked and insured delivery method. Want to drop it off? That’s okay too. Monday to Friday, from 9am to 5:30pm is good; no appointment necessary: simply prepare the item as described above.
Do you want a quoted price prior to having one of our engineers evaluate it? Fill out the description of the drive and issue/problem on this page and one of our engineers will review your request and respond with a customised/quoted price.
We’ll be in touch shortly. If it’s urgent, call 01865 593000.
We do not rely on end user software applications. Rather, our expertise lies at the platform and firmware levels. Therefore, it rarely matters what model number is shown on the outer case. Regardless if you have a Western Digital Blue, Black, Red, Gold or Ultrastar; Seagate Barracuda, IronWolf or Exos series (including Rescue-bundled drives); Toshiba; Hitachi/HGST; Samsung or older Maxtor drives, they all require the same steps: stabilise the mechanics; copy the adaptive parameters from one medium to the other; rebuild the service area; create a read-only image of the volume. There may be different firmware families used by manufacturers but the imaging-first process described above will always be the same.
Many of our clients’ calls regarding failing hard drives relate to these technological issues.
Normally, but please turn it off immediately. If it continues to click, the heads are unable to locate their servo data and each time it rotates you risk scratching the surface that contains your files. Recovery usually involves installing an identically matching donor-head stack, followed by imaging the drive in very short passes.
Typically firmware as opposed to mechanical failure. Hard drives retrieve their operating software (firmware) from a reserved service area and if one of the modules in this area is unreadable, the drive cannot “describe” itself; therefore, it will report that it has zero capacity or a model number of blank space, even though it sounds like it’s functioning properly. In most cases your data remains unaffected.
Yes, and quite frequently. While elderly drives do present unique problems they also represent a speciality rather than a major issue; there is considerable knowledge of how to recover from them, although obtaining donor components for obscure models may be difficult at times, which in some instances may affect timing versus the ability to perform the recovery.
On its own whenever possible: less likely to go astray during shipment, less expensive to ship and quicker to start working on. A local computer repair store can remove the drive within minutes. Units that are external should include their entire housing unit when shipping.
No. Drives that are failing to the point where they have begun to retire sectors will continue to do so. The purpose of data recovery is to get back what you can, and then replace the drive as it may be beyond repair. Repair software is focused on maintaining a consistent file system (i.e., allowing the operating system to boot) vs. recovering your lost data.
For a single drive, from £300 + VAT. After completing a free 48-hour diagnostic, all quotes are fixed and written. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data; donor work requires a 50% deposit, and the balance is only due on success.
We provide a free diagnostic, with our standard rate being £300 + VAT per drive. Every type of hard drive is recovered in house, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Begin your recovery now.