A drive that has started clicking is on a clock, and every further power-on spends some of what is left. Switch it off, leave it off, and get it here — the fault is classified inside 48 hours at no charge and the figure that follows is fixed before anything is opened. Note that recovery and repair are not the same thing: a disk fitted with donor parts is a vehicle for getting your data off once, not a drive to trust again afterwards.
$ cdr diagnose /dev/sdb → Device: Seagate Barracuda · 2 TB → Status: CLICKING — head crash, will not spin → Client: confidential · Cambridge, Cambridgeshire $ cdr engineer-working → Read-write heads: replaced · matched donor → Service area: firmware modules repaired → Imaging: 1.9 TB / 2 TB · 9sectors mapped $ cdr verify → ✓ documents — 18,300 files → ✓ photos — 24,110 files → ✓ drive recovered — data back
The class decides the method, the price and the honest odds, which is why the diagnostic classifies before it quotes. Nothing else about the drive matters as much as which of these four it is.
Clicking, grinding, a faint whine, or nothing at all. Something inside has physically failed and the drive must be opened in filtered air. This is the class where every extra power-on costs you readable surface.
Dead on power with no sound. Usually a shorted component or a surge through the board. The disk itself is frequently untouched — the adaptive ROM is moved to a matched board and the drive images normally.
Spins up perfectly and reports nonsense — wrong capacity, no model name, or nothing at all. The modules the drive loads at start-up have been damaged. No physical fault, and no amount of software will touch it.
The hardware is fine and the structures describing your files are not. Deletion, formatting, a failed partition resize, a corrupt table. The cheapest class and the one most often made worse by attempting it yourself.
This is the part of the process that is hardest to sell and matters most.
A failing drive has a finite number of good reads left in it. Every time it is powered on, every time a repair utility scans it, every time somebody tries one more thing, some of that budget is spent — and on a mechanical failure it is spent on scoring the surface the data sits on.
So the first thing that happens here is a sector-by-sector clone taken on hardware imagers built for the job, working around bad areas rather than hammering them. Everything afterwards runs against that image. If a reconstruction attempt fails, we go back to the copy and try something else. Nothing we do can reduce what was recoverable the day the drive arrived, which is a guarantee no software running on the failing disk itself can make.
The one thing that ends a recovery. Running chkdsk, a repair utility or a rebuild against a physically failing drive. It writes to the disk it is trying to fix, and on a drive shedding surface it converts a recoverable job into a partial one. If the drive is making any noise it has never made before, switch it off.
Donor matching works on family, head count and firmware revision rather than capacity, which is why the model number on the label matters more than the size. These are the families that come through most often and what each tends to do when it fails.
The single most misunderstood part of mechanical recovery, and the thing that most affects how long a job takes.
When a head stack fails it has to be replaced with one from a working drive. People reasonably assume that means buying the same model, and it does not. Two drives carrying the identical model number can have different head configurations, different platter counts and different firmware revisions, and a mismatch on any of those means the replacement stack will not read the surface it is placed above.
A usable donor has to match on family, head map and firmware generation, which is why the label on your drive matters more than its capacity. We hold stock of the families this region sends most — the Barracuda and WD Blue generations, the 2.5-inch Toshiba MQ range, and a deliberate reserve of older IDE and early SATA families because fenland industrial equipment keeps producing them.
Where a donor has to be sourced, that affects the timescale rather than the outcome. You will be told at the diagnostic whether one is in stock or has to be found, and the written quotation accounts for it either way. Why “repair” is the wrong word →
Less a capability list than an accurate picture of one bench in one region.
Two streams dominate and they could not look less alike. From the south of the county come single 2.5-inch externals and laptop disks holding work that exists nowhere else — a thesis, a sequencing run, four years of a doctorate on a drive bought in a supermarket. Technically these are ordinary jobs. What is not ordinary is that there is no second copy and usually a submission date in the calendar.
From north of Ely the character changes completely. Packhouse line controllers, weighbridge PCs, grain store and irrigation systems, yard CCTV recorders — drives that have run continuously for a decade or more in cold, damp, dusty conditions. These arrive contaminated and often corroded, frequently on IDE or early SATA because the equipment they control will not talk to anything newer. Neither is hopeless; they need different handling and different donors.
Published rather than quoted case by case, so you can hold it against anyone else's.
A single hard drive is from £300 +VAT — internal, external or laptop, and the same figure whether the fault turns out to be a dead board or a failed head stack. Drives forming part of a RAID, NAS or server are array work and start from £500 +VAT.
Where it splits is the deposit. Most jobs run no fix, no fee: the recovery fails, you pay nothing. Where the drive has to be opened in filtered air or fitted with donor parts, those costs are committed the moment work starts, so there is a 50% deposit with the balance payable only on success. You will know which of the two applies before you agree to anything.
Switch it off and leave it off. Clicking means the heads cannot locate their servo data, and every further power-on risks scoring the surface your files sit on. How long it ran after the first noise affects the result more than anything we do afterwards.
No, and the difference matters. A drive fitted with donor parts is a vehicle for reading your data off once — it is not a drive to put back into service. Anyone offering to repair a mechanically failed disk and return it working is describing something that does not exist.
Usually, and the odds depend almost entirely on whether it was running at the time. A drive dropped while powered off often survives with nothing worse than a stuck head stack. One dropped mid-write may have scored the platter, and that damage is permanent.
Silence usually points at the board rather than the mechanics, which is the cheaper end. Adaptive ROM data is transferred to a matched replacement board and the drive images normally. Sometimes it is stiction instead, where the heads have bonded to the surface.
Two to ten working days from your approval. Logical faults sit at the short end. Mechanical work needing a donor sits at the long end, and where a donor has to be sourced you will be told at the diagnostic rather than discovering it later.
Send the bare drive where you are confident removing it, packed in an anti-static bag with padding around it. If you are not confident, send the machine — a laptop travels perfectly well and we would rather that than a drive damaged during removal.
One fixed figure at £300 +VAT for a single drive, agreed in writing after the free diagnostic and unchanged afterwards. Clean-air work and donor parts where the fault is mechanical, and on most jobs nothing to pay if the data does not come back.