A dead hard disk is much less likely to be the end of the world than you think. If your hard disk is making that awful click noise, will not spin up, isn’t recognised at all, or has quietly started losing files, this does not mean that the contents are gone forever. The contents are usually still there, on the platters. What we need to do is get them out safely. We have been retrieving data from hard disks for over two decades. This includes individual desktop and laptop hard disks as well as the disks used within RAID arrays and servers. We provide data recovery services to private individuals and business clients all over the UK. First contact us for a quote either via telephone or using the form. Then send your damaged hard disk in from anywhere or drop it at our laboratory in Belfast. No appointment is required.
Every single drive fault belongs to one of three families (and the best fix for one family is the worst thing you could do to another).
We are an expert UK data recovery company for all forms of hard drive data recovery: laptop and desktop drives, internal and external drives, regardless of manufacturer. We can help whether your drive is clicking, will not be detected, is corrupted, has been formatted or even dropped. All of these are covered by our hard drive data recovery services. Also, we do not require you to visit us; simply obtain a quote first, either over the telephone or through our website form, then post your drive in to our Belfast lab from anywhere within the UK. Alternatively you may drop off your drive personally at our Belfast lab (no appointment needed).
All of our recoveries take place in-house, therefore none of your data will ever be sent to a third party. Your recovery process commences with a free diagnostic, which is followed by a fixed price in writing prior to any recovery being undertaken. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Over twenty years’ experience of HDD recovery sits behind each recovery case, ranging from a single failing disk to the most complex mechanical failures.
Almost everything about a hard drive recovery will be determined by which of three families the fault falls into, so it’s the first thing we determine. A mechanical failure is within the sealed case of your drive (read/write heads or the motor) and requires bench repair and matched donor parts. Running software on the drive just makes the problem worse. An electronic failure is either on the circuit board or in the firmware of your drive; the platters are good, but the drive cannot communicate with the computer until repairs have been made to the board or the firmware has been rebuilt. A logical failure leaves the hardware intact but prevents access to your data; an example could include having deleted a folder, reformatted a disk, corrupted a file system, or simply lost a partition.
This makes a difference as the response to each is completely different, and if you get it wrong then what could be a recoverable drive becomes an unrecoverable one. You can use repair software to fix a logical problem, but once the heads have started to fail the repair software will finish off the disk. A disk damaged by a voltage spike can be brought back to life using a donor PCB; however, the damage caused by a corrupted file system cannot be repaired using a donor PCB. We determine into which of these families your failure falls before we do anything else. And since our diagnosis is complimentary, you will know exactly where you stand without paying a penny.
Clicking, ticking, or repetitive buzzing. These sounds almost always indicate a problem with the read/write heads (a head crash or failed head stack). The disk is continuously trying to seek and reset due to an inability to read its own servo information. This is a mechanical issue: donor heads need to match the original and care needs to be taken when performing an image (more on the sound in clicking and grinding drives). Each time you turn the disk on, the damaged heads have a chance to score the platter(s), therefore turn it off.
Won’t turn on: doesn’t spin or make any noise. This is normally the circuit board: either a blown TVS diode (a transient voltage suppression device) caused by an electrical power surge, or a component that has burned out. Although the data itself is fine, the electronic components in the drive have failed. Repairing this requires finding a replacement circuit board for the drive that matches the specifications of the old one. In addition to the replacement circuit board, the firmware ROM has to be copied from the old board onto the new one. A “blind” swap would be unsuccessful as modern hard disk drives contain unique calibration information that is stored within their firmware ROM. Therefore, if the two boards do not match, they will not function together.
Spins, but is never detected. Often this means that there is some type of firmware corruption on the drive. Essentially, the drive’s service area stores all of the hidden modules that allow the drive to become ready once it boots, and these have become corrupted, preventing the drive from becoming usable. Your data on the disks themselves remains intact; however, the drive is essentially hung in a state of being partially booted. To get the drive back into a readable state requires using specialist tools to rebuild the firmware, restoring the correct functionality to each module and allowing the drive to successfully boot.
The symptoms of a failing drive include slow speeds, freezing, or even files that will not open. This develops as bad sectors form on an ageing drive. While you can usually still read from the drive at this point, you’re running out of time. At this stage you need to discontinue use of the failing drive and have it imaged immediately, prior to losing access to additional sectors.
Deleted, formatted, corrupted or RAW. This is the logical family. There is no physical problem with the hard drive, and the data is almost always still intact. Do not continue to write new data to the drive (the new data writes over the old data); do not format it if your operating system prompts you to do so; and allow us to create an image of the drive and recreate the file system based upon that image.
Physically damaged through being dropped or exposed to water. A drop can cause mechanical shock to the drive, resulting in the heads being forced against the platter. Exposure to liquids causes electrical shorting and/or corrosion. In either case, do not power up the drive to ‘test’ whether it works: at that point the actual damage occurs (see water and fire damage).
The majority of preventable data loss occurs after the storage device has failed, not during failure. Here are some things to try and resist:
Do not continue cycling power on a clicking or grinding drive. Every time you cycle the power, you give the heads another opportunity to damage your platter(s). Once it starts making noise, unplug it and do not plug it back in again: the chances of recovering your data only fall the longer it continues to fail.
Do not run CHKDSK, Disk Utility “First Aid” or any type of “repair tool” on a drive that contains important information and do not format it if Windows prompts you to. The above actions cause writing to occur on the disk as part of attempting to “fix” the issue at hand. On a failing or damaged disk, this will routinely make the problem worse or even prevent the recovery of the data.
Do not run any type of recovery software on a drive that is failing mechanically. Performing a deep scan on a disk will read every sector on the disk for extended periods of time. This is the last thing a drive that has failing heads or bad sectors can withstand. Recovery software is suitable for use on a healthy drive that simply presents a logical error and is dangerous to use on any other type.
Do not open your drive, and do not place the failing drive in a freezer. Your hard drive’s platters can easily be ruined by normal room dust. Therefore, it should never be opened anywhere other than a specialist data recovery laboratory. Freezing the drive is also a myth: when a drive is frozen, condensation occurs, damaging your platters. Leave your drive unplugged, still and dry, and allow it to be evaluated properly.
If mechanical failure occurs, attempting to physically access the drive anywhere other than a specialist data recovery lab will be the end of it: the slightest contact with a dust particle on a rotating platter at thousands of RPM will render the surface unusable. In our lab, the team identifies a matched donor drive of the same make/model/firmware series as the original failing drive and replaces the component that has failed. Most commonly this is the head assembly but occasionally the motor itself is the problem. It requires precise workmanship since the read/write heads float just nanometres over the top of the platters and can’t be touched by hand.
Once we have access to the drive again, we are going to take it slow in copying all of the information. We will use sector-by-sector forensic imaging onto a healthy target and read slowly through each weak spot in the drive while making multiple passes to pick up as much data as possible before the drive fails. Once this is done, no additional operations will ever occur directly on the original drive. All further operations will be performed on the forensic image of the drive. Therefore, nothing that we do during this operation could possibly harm your data. Finally, once the forensic image has been created, we will rebuild the file system and recover your data files. The final step is checking all recovered files against what should be there.
This recovery occurs at the level of the hard disk, therefore any manufacturer and any capacity is supported. Examples include Seagate (Barracuda, IronWolf, SkyHawk and internal drives within their external enclosures), Western Digital (Blue, Black, Red, Gold and WD external drives), Toshiba, HGST, Samsung and older Maxtor and Hitachi drives. This includes desktop 3.5" drives and laptop 2.5" drives. Also supported are SATA, SAS and legacy IDE. And everything from small older disks to the largest multi-terabyte helium-filled disks.
In general, hard drives don’t fail alone either, and if your hard drive was part of a larger RAID array failure, part of a NAS box or even just a server, we recover those too: we will image each and every surviving disk to rebuild the entire system offline. Also, if the drive contained a cryptocurrency wallet file that’s now stuck on the drive, that’s a speciality of ours: see our section on crypto wallet recovery.
All recoveries begin with a free diagnostic: the fault family is identified, a truthful assessment is made regarding the likelihood of successful recovery of the data, and a fixed written quote is issued along with a full list of recoverable files which can be reviewed prior to committing to any chargeable work. On most jobs, you only pay if we recover your data.
Pricing varies per case, as a logical recovery and a head transplant are vastly different levels of effort: a flat ‘hard drive’ price would be completely meaningless. Also, since the entire process is completed via insured, tracked post or drop-off at our lab in Belfast (no appointment needed), your location does not matter: we complete hard disk recovery for clients across the UK and Ireland every week, from individual laptop drives to failed business arrays.
Generally, yes, but shut it down now. Clicking is almost always a head failure, and it will require replacing the faulty head, followed by careful imaging. The problem you have is that each time you turn it on again, the damaged heads continue to mark (scratch) your disks, so the probability of disk damage increases with each power-up cycle. Shut it off and keep it off; do not attempt to use freezing as a means to recover.
It does not have to be. A common cause of an undetected disk is a circuit board or firmware failure while the data is still fully intact. It may also just be a simple logical problem. In neither case would that be considered “lost” data. Begin by eliminating the possibility of cable, port or computer issues. Once you’ve eliminated those possibilities and nothing can see the drive, then it becomes a board-level or firmware recovery operation. This will bring your drive back to being readable again, allowing the data to be imaged off.
No. If you see a drive marked as RAW or prompting you to format it, then the file system on the drive has been corrupted, not the data, and your files will almost always still exist. The one thing most likely to make those files irretrievable (from this point forward) would be for you to format the drive. So do nothing. We’ll run an image of the drive, and rebuild the file system using the copied version of your drive.
Only when the mechanical health of the hard drive is normal (quiet, spins at correct speed, no SMART alerts or read errors) and the problem is purely logical (like a deleted file or corrupted file system). Don’t do a deep scan on a drive that’s clicking, slow or throwing errors. A deep scan will continuously read off the drive for hours. It could cause enough stress to push the drive over the edge. When the data matters and you’re unsure about the condition of the drive, have it imaged first.
It depends on the nature of the fault. A logical recovery could be as short as a day or two, whereas a mechanical recovery that requires donor parts and slow imaging of a weak drive can take longer. In cases where the state of the drive has deteriorated significantly, each imaging pass is carefully executed and cannot be hurried without risking the data. With every quotation, we provide an estimated timeframe for completion and also offer a fast track option if there is a need for urgency.
No. Our laboratory is based in Belfast; however, all hard drive recoveries are carried out via postal services or via client drop-off, so our recovery services cover the entire UK and Ireland. Once you have received a quote, either via telephone call or through the submission form, please post your drive to us using insured and traceable delivery or, alternatively, feel free to drop off your drive in person (no appointment needed). The recovery process and diagnostics, along with quotes, will be identical regardless of your location.
Get a quote first, by phone or using the form, then send it in or drop it off (no appointment needed). We will diagnose the fault, tell you honestly if your data can be recovered, and give you a fixed written quote before any chargeable work is performed. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data.