Straight-talking guides on failing drives, lost files and what to do before you make things worse — written by the engineers who recover this stuff every day, in-house.
The single best thing you can do for a clicking or failing drive is stop using it and get in touch. Powering on a failing drive is what usually turns recoverable into lost.
Clicking, vanishing, dying or dead — the most common drive symptoms, and what to do about each.
The heads cannot find their servo data, so the actuator retracts and retries. How long it runs after the first click decides the outcome more than we do.
Drives warn you for weeks before they stop. Five signs in the order they appear, the three SMART fields that matter, and the one utility not to run.
Four checks that cost nothing, working outward from the drive. Most enquiries on this resolve at the cable, the port or the power supply.
Often the boot configuration failed rather than the drive. How to tell which, and why repair tools write to a disk you may still need.
The drive read a sector and the checksum did not match. Sometimes physical degradation, sometimes just a cable. Why chkdsk makes it worse.
Windows cannot read the file system, which is not the same as empty. Four causes, all recoverable if you decline the prompt.
An NTFS message meaning the master file table is damaged, not your files. Why letting chkdsk repair it is usually the wrong call.
The index describing the file is damaged and the content is frequently intact. Chkdsk optimises for a consistent volume, not for your files.
Silent, whining, spinning-but-undetected and detected-but-unreadable are four different faults with four different prospects and prices.
Most SMART data is noise. Three fields tell you whether a drive is failing, and the overall health status is not one of them.
When you can safely DIY, and how to get deleted files back without making things worse.
Deleting removes the pointer and leaves the data — on a hard drive. On an SSD, TRIM erases it within minutes. What not to install, and where.
From a camera card, usually. From a phone, usually not. Why the source decides it, and the free places to check before paying anyone.
Cards fail during writes, formats and bad readers, not at rest. Why the images are usually still there, and the prompts that destroy them.
Two of the three parts in an external are not the disk. Why shucking a WD My Passport destroys your access to the data.
Nobody repairs a stick and hands it back working. What you are buying is one read, and construction — discrete or monolithic — decides how.
Four places the 48-digit key is almost certainly stored, starting with your Microsoft account. And the honest position if none of them has it.
On a modern phone, yes and permanently. On an older mechanical drive, often not. What that means whether you are selling or undoing a mistake.
No. Apple replaces components and the original drive is not returned. Why recovery has to come before repair if the data matters.
The difference is documentation, not technique. Write-blocked acquisition, hash verification and custody — none of which can be applied later.
£250–600 for a drive, £500–1,500 for an array. Four questions worth asking any laboratory, including this one.
Higher-stakes recoveries — failed arrays and solid-state drives — explained simply.
The failure you noticed was almost certainly the second one. Why a rebuild is the riskiest step available to you, and what to send instead.
A stripe keeps no parity and no mirror, so one failed disk takes a slice out of every file. What can be recovered, and why nobody can rebuild it from parity.
Each member of a mirror holds a complete copy, which often mounts in an ordinary PC. Try that before paying anyone — and never rebuild in the wrong direction.
It survives multiple failures if they land in different pairs, and dies if both halves of one pair go. Why the pair, not the array, is the unit of risk.
A stalled rebuild is the array telling you the surviving disks cannot supply clean reads. Each retry is another full pass over disks already failing.
Only one of the four is a data fault. Why most units run ordinary Linux mdadm underneath, and why a dead box is rarely a lost volume.
The array can be healthy and the volume still unmountable, because the map between logical and physical blocks has gone. Which QTS prompts to decline.
Usually yes. The flash rarely fails — the controller does, and the data behind it is generally intact. What decides whether it comes back.
SMART reports flash wear well and controller health barely at all — and the controller is what usually fails. What to look at anyway.
Seagate, WD, Toshiba, Samsung and SanDisk — the makes we see most, and what to do when yours fails.
The 7200.11 firmware fault that reports 0 GB with no physical damage, why SMR Barracudas image slowly, and how donors are matched.
The colour tells you what it was built for. And why My Passport and My Book must be sent in their cases — the key is on the bridge board.
Reliable until it is not. Controller failure with no SMART warning, why thermal history matters, and how encryption changes what is possible.
Working Monday, absent Tuesday, with the flash in good health. Why a firmware update makes it worse, and the two routes past a dead controller.
Mostly laptops, and mostly impact. Whether the drive was running when it was dropped decides most of the outcome.
Better built than most, so they arrive worn rather than crashed — frequently from equipment nobody has thought about for a decade.
A Seagate drive in a better case. The bumper genuinely works; the Thunderbolt bridge is what makes a healthy disk look dead.
XFS on mdadm behind a locked door. Why the disks will not mount in a PC, and why the firmware recovery tool can reinitialise your array.
The 2023 Extreme Portable failures, discrete versus monolithic construction, and how to spot a counterfeit reporting a capacity it never had.
The hardware went, the formats did not. Zip cartridges, StorCenter arrays and eGo drives are all still readable.
Nothing has been made since 2006, so every one is legacy — usually out of industrial equipment. Donors are the constraint, not the method.
Newmarket about it only gets you so far. Send us a few details or call — we'll give you a straight answer and a free diagnostic, with no fix, no fee on most jobs.