An external hard drive consists of three separate components that together form the hard drive unit: a physical disk, a circuit board (bridge board) to convert the signals from the disk into USB-compatible signals, and a cable or connection for powering the unit. Of these three elements, two are not the actual disk itself. The majority of all external hard drives' failure issues will be with those two. In fact, it's very common to find a perfectly good disk inside a dead external case. You should send the entire casing to us instead of attempting to open the casing yourself. There are many external cases where the encryption key lives within the casing, and therefore if you were to simply remove the internal disk, this would eliminate the ability to read it.
An external drive can be thought of as a compact assembly, and two out of its three components are not the disk. Knowing which part has failed changes the cost by several hundred pounds.
This would typically be a standard, off-the-shelf 2.5 or 3.5-inch drive mechanism from the same company that produced the case. When the failure is related to this portion of the assembly, then we consider this a normal hard drive recovery process and price accordingly.
This is the translation circuit (bridge board) that takes the SATA connection of the internal drive and converts it into a USB interface. On several ranges this is also where the encryption key resides. It fails at least as often as the disk itself, and this is the part of the assembly that people discard.
On 3.5-inch desktop units it is a separate mains adapter. In portable units it is a micro-USB or USB-C connector that has been knocked when connected. It’s inexpensive to repair and often solves the entire issue.
This is the single costliest misconception in recovering an external hard drive, and can be entirely avoided.
All over the internet people are saying to “shuck” the unit; i.e., remove the casing, pull the raw (naked) hard disk out, and connect it directly into a SATA port. That works for some enclosure types. For several of the most common ones it will render the data permanently inaccessible.
Both WD My Passport and My Book models encrypt data at the hardware bridge. There is only ciphertext on the raw hard disk inside the casing and the encryption key is stored on the tiny circuit board that was discarded during disassembly. Once this raw disk is attached to a PC it will report as “unformatted”, so of course Windows immediately prompts to initialise it. Unfortunately many users comply with this prompt, thus converting what was a recoverable job into a much more difficult task.
We recommend sending us the entire unit including the casing, the board, the cable and the power supply (if it has one). There is no additional charge to do this, nor does it take any additional time, and it allows us to associate your raw disk with its original bridge rather than trying to recreate the encryption from scratch.
If the drive is already out of the case, keep the case. Even though the board may look dead, do not dispose of the case, the board, or the cable. The small electronic piece on an encrypting bridge will make all the difference between recovering your data routinely and attempting an impossible recovery.
Depending on which range your drive falls in, it could allow direct access to its contents or require continued attachment to its original circuit board.
This is our typical experience within this area, and why we quote turnaround time first when discussing pricing.
A portable external hard drive is the default backup of any researcher. That said, in a university city a portable external is the primary copy far more often than it should be. A portable external (a 1–4TB USB device, three or four years old) generally comes into our lab with all of the working data from a PhD, a grant project or a small consultancy. There are no copies elsewhere (not even in the cloud).
So two things follow. Firstly, send us the entire unit instead of just sending the drive itself, for the reasons above. Secondly, state your deadline when you first contact us. If there is a looming submission deadline, then we will often recover the specific chapters or datasets you need first and do the full recovery later at no additional charge.
We also charge from £300 +VAT for an external unit, which is the same as any one disk. The price usually sits at the lower end of the range if the fault lies with the bridge circuitry rather than the physical mechanical components of the external, because in these cases we don’t have to open up the drive.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. If the drive needs to be disassembled (opened) or additional components need to be installed (donor parts), you will need to put down a 50% deposit as the cost to open or install the components commits when the process begins. Prior to agreeing to anything you are made aware of whether this applies.
It is not necessarily dead, and in many cases it is not. Bridge board, power supply and socket failures occur more frequently than mechanical failures. A drive that is completely silent on a good cable and port is well worth trying to diagnose prior to deciding it's bad.
No. With WD My Passport & My Book drives the encryption key is stored on the bridge board and removing the bridge board renders the data unreadable. Please send the entire device, including all cables and power supplies.
No. This error message indicates that Windows is unable to read the file system, which is what one would anticipate from a bridge board failure, an encrypted external hard drive removed from its housing, or logical damage. Formatting would greatly reduce your chances of recovering your data.
The fault is mechanical and it is on a clock. Shut it down and do not turn the drive back on to see if it works. If your drive was hit by something while it was spinning, then at least part of the platter could be damaged, and with each subsequent spin the damage will continue.
Commonly seen, particularly on the Seagate and Toshiba portable product lines. A broken USB socket can be repaired at the board level (to allow us to recover data from the device), but this is not a permanent solution to your failed hard drive. We have priced this type of recovery as a standard recovery of a single unit.
This is different from bridge encryption, and we need the recovery key or password to access the encrypted files. There is no method to access your files without this information. On a work machine, the key is almost certainly stored in either Azure AD or Intune, which means you should check before proceeding under the assumption that the key is lost.
£300 +VAT per drive, with a fixed written quote prior to attempting recovery. Please send us the entire unit including the outer casing. On many devices, the only component capable of decrypting the disk is the bridge board contained within the housing, and the case is the drive.