The drive holding the backup is so often the drive that fails. Knocked off a desk, jolted mid-transfer or simply refusing to show up any more — we recover external hard drives, portable hard drives and USB hard drives from every maker, week in and week out, across Staines and Surrey.
Free diagnostic on every external drive job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
Every external drive job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twelve cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
How most externals die: the heads crash on impact, and every extra power-up gambles the platters they're resting on.
The LED proves power, nothing more — a failed USB bridge, board or firmware is keeping the drive mute.
Yanked cables and half-finished writes corrupt the file system; your files sit quietly beneath that error box.
A beep is the motor losing its fight with stuck heads or a seized bearing — pull the power and leave it.
Bridge or electronics failure; we image through the original board, or around it, whichever the drive allows.
My Passports and Elements encrypt without telling you — the data survives a dead board, but a DIY enclosure swap reads as nonsense.
My Book-style units regularly die with their own power bricks — sometimes a five-minute fault, occasionally a real mess.
Bad sectors are creeping across the platters; hardware imagers work around them while there's still time.
Stop using the drive the instant it happens and the odds of a complete recovery are excellent.
Platters take far more punishment than people assume — decontaminated, transplanted and imaged under clean airflow.
Seagate's slim portables fail heads after a knock and start clicking — donor heads are fitted before imaging.
Older Iomega and LaCie desktop units die with their power bricks or bridge chips while the disk inside survives untouched.
External drives lead rough lives: hauled around in bags, knocked off desks, unplugged mid-write. A drop while the platters are spinning is the classic killer — the heads touch down and the drive starts clicking. We recover WD My Passport and Elements, Seagate Expansion and Backup Plus, LaCie, Buffalo, Toshiba Canvio and every other brand, including models with encrypted or USB-soldered boards that can't simply be swapped into another enclosure.
Plenty of modern portable drives encrypt your data invisibly in hardware — the USB bridge board is part of the lock. Pull the bare disk out, connect it over SATA, and you're greeted with gibberish, which sends a lot of DIY attempts into a panic. It's completely normal, and it's routine for us: we recover through or around the original bridge so your files come back exactly as they were.
Take the jacket off an external and there's a hard drive inside — so the whole drive bench applies, joined by the bridge kit:
Puts your drive into manufacturer service mode on the industry-standard firmware rig, where broken translators are repaired, defects remapped and locked service areas opened up.
Your drive is copied sector by sector under per-head control, with the current monitored and reads retried automatically — a level of care no software imager offers.
Any time a drive is opened it happens under Class-100 filtered airflow; heads and platters never meet open air at a desk.
Specialist combs and lifters let a head stack come out, or an entire platter pack move to a donor chassis, without the surfaces ever touching.
We keep thousands of donors catalogued by model, firmware family and site code, so the head assembly or board your drive needs is normally in stock the day it arrives.
WD's hardware-encrypted portables and other SED enclosures are imaged and decrypted through their original bridge chain.
When an interface board fails, a matching donor comes off the shelf so an encrypted drive never loses its key chain.
Portable SSDs (T5/T7, SanDisk Extreme) are a growing share of the shelf — different insides, same free diagnostic. WD My Passport and Elements drives encrypt through the USB bridge, so a failed bridge locks the data until it's imaged through the original chain; Seagate Expansion and Backup Plus portables click after a knock; and older LaCie, Buffalo and Iomega desktop units tend to die with their power bricks or bridge chips while the disk inside survives.
Iomega is gone — the brand passed through EMC and LenovoEMC before disappearing entirely — which leaves no support line, no spares and no official answer for anyone still holding data on one. We cover the whole span: eGo and Prestige portable and desktop drives, Home Media network units, and the Zip and Jaz cartridges of the nineties, including click-of-death casualties, read on working period hardware kept for exactly this. The Iomega badge on the outside changes nothing about the standard drive engineering inside, and recovery follows the same lab process as any current maker.
LaCie Rugged drives live in camera bags, and the orange bumper genuinely helps — but it can't save a drive jolted mid-transfer or one worn out by years on location, which is why film crews and photographers send us so many. The d2 and Porsche Design desktop ranges more often fail at the interface board, with Thunderbolt and USB electronics giving up while the disk itself stays sound. Buffalo's MiniStation portables, including the encrypted Extreme versions, follow the same route as any 2.5-inch external: out of the shell, onto the imagers, encryption handled with your password where one was set.
My Passport, Elements, Expansion and Backup Plus units are the two external families posted in to us most often — cheap enough that they end up as the only home of a photo or business archive rather than the backup to one. Both makers build them on slim 2.5-inch mechanics with the USB connector soldered straight to the drive's own board, so there's no off-the-shelf case to move the disk into when things go wrong. Most arrive after sliding off a sofa, a desk or a car seat, and with donor parts stocked for both makers' current ranges, the mechanical damage inside is familiar territory for the bench.
Most customers post their media to us tracked and insured.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Guildford Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.