The hard disk could click, beep, refuse to start spinning, or just fail to show up altogether. But regardless of which way it has chosen to go wrong, it doesn't mean that you've lost access to your files forever. We do data recovery from failed hard drives (and hard disks) every week for households and businesses based in Staines and throughout the Spelthorne borough, starting with a free diagnosis and one fixed written quote before we even begin.
Free diagnostic on every hard drive job. You get one fixed quote in writing before we start any work.
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.
All hard drive recovery jobs begin by identifying the fault from its symptoms: below are twelve examples which cover almost all the faults that arrive at our bench.
A rhythmic clicking sound is often indicative of head failure and will typically be caused when a failed head stack is sweeping for a position it cannot find.
This usually comes down to a motor that has become seized, heads that have stuck to the platter surface (stiction) or a board damaged by a power spike.
The drive powers up yet does not introduce itself to the computer: corrupted firmware or failing electronics.
A motor strained by stuck heads or a jammed bearing is what makes that beep. Cut the power and leave it off.
The recording surface is wearing through; copies stall, files hang, and further use speeds this decline.
The internal map used by the drive has failed (a common Seagate issue), so the drive reports zero capacity or sits at busy.
The heads are driven into the disk surface when a knock lands while the platters are spinning; a drop from desk level is usually enough.
Lightning strikes, cheap AC/DC adapters and bad PSUs will cook the controller board, and the drive's unique ROM chip is often located right on it.
Beneath all of this, the original files are typically still intact; it is simply the amount of writing that occurred afterwards which determines how much comes back.
The drive is identified and appears OK, but wants to be initialised or reads RAW. That's a broken index, not lost data.
A known Seagate failure: the drive gets stuck 'busy' and claims 0 capacity. It can be fixed using service mode on the firmware bench.
On old Toshiba 2.5" and Hitachi Travelstar drives, the heads begin to time out and read slowly for quite some time before completely failing.
Files stored in a mechanical hard drive sit on a series of precisely manufactured platters, which are read by mechanical arms called heads. The heads "fly" over each platter at a distance measured in nanometres, so every extra power-up on a failing disk is a gamble that may damage it further. We work daily with Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, Samsung and Hitachi drives. Whether it's 2.5" laptop drives, large capacity desktop drives or CCTV surveillance units, we have seen them all. When your hard disk begins to click or has taken a knock, the best thing you can do is leave it switched off. Repeatedly powering it on while it's damaged will only increase the chance of scoring the platters, making the job far more difficult.
We see failed heads and clicking mechanisms, stuck spindle motors, PCB electronics damaged or destroyed by a power spike, corrupted firmware, spreading bad sectors and slow or erratic drives, as well as accidental formats and partition deletions, all crossing our bench. We have an in-house parts inventory that allows us to source matching donor components. Every single hard drive that comes into this facility is first imaged sector by sector using hardware imaging tools designed for unstable media.
You can judge a lab by the equipment on its bench. Each piece you see here is part of the professional stack that every job goes through when it comes into this laboratory:
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.
A micro-soldering station is used to revive surge-damaged boards and carry your unique ROM chip over to a donor board.
A write-blocker prevents any data being written to your original drive. This physical barrier ensures that the original media cannot be altered while we work on it.
Any platter-based drive is worked on here. Whether it is a modern NAS or surveillance drive or an old IDE disk pulled from a PC retired 20 years ago, we work on them all. The Seagate Barracuda line is known for firmware and translator faults as well as BSY lock-ups. WD drives tend to lose their heads after an impact, and power surges burn out their PCBs. Head units on the Hitachi, HGST and Toshiba 2.5" lines wear down and read slowly. Legacy Maxtor DiamondMax disks tend to seize their motors after long periods of disuse.
Some of the most common disks posted to us from Staines, out of old desktops and laptops, are from the Deskstar and Travelstar lines that Hitachi took over from IBM in 2003, plus the HGST-badged drives that followed when the division became part of WD. Each of them tends to lose one head at a time, which is why the imager takes an image of each platter surface the good heads can access, then a matching donor unit completes the job for what's left. This process works identically on every Deskstar, Travelstar and Ultrastar model, at every capacity level.
The Barracuda series of disks produced by Seagate have a known problem in their service-area firmware. In many cases, although they spin up normally, the drives won't show up on the computer at all, or appear with no storage capacity listed. Problems such as this typically aren't mechanical: the faulty firmware modules are rebuilt using the drive's diagnostic terminal, without the platters ever being exposed. If a Barracuda has begun to click since a fall, it needs a donor head assembly fitted on the head-swap bench before imaging starts. Both processes occur on a regular basis here.
Western Digital's portable range works in its own way. Inside a My Passport or Elements, the USB port is mounted directly onto the controller board, and all data going to the drive passes through hardware-based encryption before reaching the platters. Thus if the board fails, it cannot simply be swapped into a new case. We repair or transplant the electronics along with the encryption keys, then image the drive as normal. In addition, many newer Western Digital drives have developed service-area problems that result in the computer detecting the drive but reading from it very slowly; these can typically be resolved with firmware-level access prior to taking an image of the drive.
Although neither of these badges has been seen on a brand-new hard disk in years (Maxtor was acquired by Seagate in 2006, and Samsung's hard drive division followed in 2011), it is still common enough to see SpinPoint or DiamondMax disks coming out of attics and the dusty back corners of older computer towers, holding all that remains of someone's family photos. When a disk has been stored for a long time it develops problems of its own, such as read/write head assemblies stuck to the platters or spindle lubricant that has stiffened with age. Both are dealt with on the repair bench before any image is created. Our legacy benches also keep IDE and early-SATA adapters and donor parts for both manufacturers, so an obsolete drive is not necessarily an unrecoverable one.
The drive has to be removed from your computer before you post it, because we only work on the bare drive. If you are unsure how to remove it, call us on 0800 689 0668 for a quote before sending the drive, or a local PC repair shop will take it out for you for a small fee.
Is the hard drive still located within a desktop computer, laptop or server? Open the machine up at your location, and then post just the bare hard drive on its own (if it's from a server, remove every disk and label each one by bay), as removing drives is a task we don't perform; it usually just requires unscrewing a few screws. Before sending off anything, please call 0800 689 0668 for a quote or use our complimentary online diagnostic. We do not recover storage that is soldered to a motherboard; it must be a removable drive that can be sent to us. If you are unsure whether your device contains a removable drive or not, give us a call before posting it.
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.