The backup drive is frequently the one that fails. External hard drives are extremely vulnerable to being knocked off a desk, and during a transfer of large amounts of data they may be jostled, damaging the mechanical components inside. Others simply decide to stop showing up. We recover external, portable and USB hard drives from all manufacturers, week in and week out, across Staines and Surrey.
No-charge diagnostic on every external hard drive job. Every customer receives a single fixed price quote in writing before we begin work on an external hard drive recovery.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. For all electronic and mechanical work, including chip-level repairs, 50% is required upfront, with the balance only payable if we recover your data. For BitLocker, ransomware, CCTV/DVR and forensic jobs, full payment is made upfront once you accept the fixed quote. Full details regarding our costs can be found on the data recovery cost page.
Our first step with each external hard drive is to match the symptoms to the mode of failure. These twelve cover most of the failures we see on the bench.
Most external hard drives fail when the drive's heads "crash" on impact. Every subsequent power-up increases the risk of damaging the platter(s) they rest upon.
A lit LED only tells you the drive has power. A failed USB bridge, board or firmware is what's stopping it talking.
Pulling the cable or stopping a write halfway corrupts the file system. Your files are usually still sitting behind that error message.
Beeping means the motor can't spin because the heads are stuck or a bearing has seized. Pull the power and leave it alone.
This is a bridge or electronics failure. We image the drive through its original board, or around it, depending on what the drive allows.
My Passport and Elements drives encrypt without telling you. The data survives a dead board, but swap the enclosure yourself and it reads as nonsense.
My Book style units often die along with their own power bricks. Sometimes that's a five-minute fault, occasionally a real mess.
Bad sectors begin to develop across the surface of the platters. There's still time for a hardware imager to work around those bad sectors if it's done now.
The moment it happens, stop using the drive. The chances of full recovery are high at this point.
Platters can take much more damage than people typically realise. They're decontaminated, transplanted and imaged on our head-swap bench.
Seagate's slim portable units tend to have their heads fail when knocked, and then begin to click. Donor heads are installed prior to imaging.
Older Iomega and LaCie desktop units often go dark because either their power brick has failed or their bridge chip has died. The disk inside, however, remains untouched.
External drives have a hard life: dragged along in backpacks, dropped off desks, pulled from wall sockets while writing is in progress. One typical way these external devices get killed is by dropping them while they're running. The heads make contact with the disks and the device starts clicking. We recover data from all brands of external devices, including Western Digital (My Passport and Elements), Seagate (Expansion and Backup Plus), LaCie, Buffalo, Toshiba (Canvio) and many others. This includes models with encrypted boards or with the USB connector soldered onto the board (and which therefore cannot easily be swapped into a new case).
Hardware-based encryption on many modern portable storage devices locks your files invisibly, and the USB bridge circuitry is part of that lock. Take the drive apart, connect the bare disk via SATA, and you will see nothing but gibberish, which sends a lot of people trying a DIY recovery into a panic. This is perfectly normal, and it's routine for us: we recover your files through or around the original bridge, so they come back exactly as they were.
Once you remove the jacket from an external drive (there's a hard drive inside), all of the standard drive bench methods apply, together with the bridge kit:
Places your drive into manufacturer service mode on the industry-standard firmware rig, where bad translators are corrected, defective sectors are remapped and previously "locked" service areas are made available.
The drive is duplicated one sector at a time under per-head control, with the current monitored and failed reads retried automatically: a degree of care that no software imaging tool provides.
Every time we open a drive, it happens on our head-swap bench and not at some ordinary desk.
Specialist combs and lifters allow us to remove a head stack, or move an entire platter pack to a donor chassis, without the surfaces ever touching.
We keep thousands of donors catalogued by model, firmware family and site code. In most cases, when your drive needs a replacement head assembly or board, we will already have it in stock the day it arrives.
WD's hardware-encrypted portable drives, as well as other SED enclosures, are imaged and decrypted through their original bridge chain.
When an interface board fails, we pull a matching donor from stock so an encrypted drive always keeps its key chain.
Portable SSDs such as the Samsung T5/T7 and SanDisk Extreme are becoming a larger share of what reaches our shelf. They have different internal components but get the same free diagnostic. WD My Passport and Elements drives contain encryption that happens at the level of the USB bridge. If the bridge fails, all data stored on the device is inaccessible until it can be imaged through the original chain. Seagate's Expansion and Backup Plus portables click after a knock, whereas many of the older LaCie, Buffalo and Iomega desktop products tend to fail when either their power brick or bridge chip reaches the end of its life, while the hard drive inside survives.
After a succession of ownership changes (EMC, then LenovoEMC), Iomega is out of business. This means there are no longer any customer service options, no parts and no official solutions for anyone still holding data on one. We cover all models produced by Iomega during its existence: eGo and Prestige portable and desktop units, Home Media network units, as well as the Zip and Jaz cartridges of the nineties, including "click of death" casualties, which we read on working period hardware kept for exactly this reason. Although the exterior case of your device carries the name "Iomega", it does not change the standard drive engineering inside, and recovery follows the same lab process as any other current maker.
LaCie Rugged drives live in photographers' and filmmakers' camera bags, and the orange bumper genuinely protects the drive. However, the bumper cannot protect a drive jolted during data transfer, nor will it help a drive worn out by years on location. This is why we receive so many from these groups. The d2 and Porsche Design desktop series are more likely to have problems with the interface board due to failure of the Thunderbolt and USB circuitry; however, the hard disk itself stays intact. Buffalo's MiniStation portable series, including the encrypted Extreme versions, all follow the path of any 2.5-inch external drive: we take the unit out of its shell, attach it to the imagers, and handle the encryption with your password where one was set.
My Passport, Elements, Expansion and Backup Plus are the two lines of external drives posted in to us most frequently: they are inexpensive, so they become the only home for photos or business archives rather than a backup. Both manufacturers use thin 2.5-inch mechanisms for these drives, and both solder the USB connector directly to the drive's own board. Therefore, when things go wrong, there's no off-the-shelf case to move the disk into. Typically, failures occur because the drive has slid off a sofa, office desk or car seat. Given that we carry donor parts for both manufacturers' current ranges, the mechanical damage inside is familiar territory for us.
Before sending anything, get a quote from us either by telephone or using our free online diagnostic. Then post your hardware to us (tracked and insured), or drop it off at our Guildford laboratory in person.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV/DVR or server? You will need to remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive, as we are unable to remove the drive for you. We also cannot recover storage soldered onto a motherboard, such as in Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops. Only drives that can be removed from a machine and sent to us can be recovered. If you are unsure whether your device has a removable drive, please call us before sending. RAID, server and SAN drives need to be removed from their enclosure and labelled by bay. For a NAS, send the disks themselves if they are removable, otherwise the entire NAS device. An external single drive should come to us whole, along with its cable and power supply.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Please mark the package for the attention of Guildford Data Recovery, and we will call you as soon as we have diagnosed your media.
Unsure as to how to proceed with sending the item in for recovery? Then simply call 0800 689 0668, or complete the free online diagnostic prior to dispatching the item to obtain your price quotation.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.