A failing clicker is “on the clock” and each subsequent power-on will lose some of what is left. Turn it off; keep it turned off; send it here. This failure is assessed in accordance with our 48-hour free assessment policy and we fix the price before opening the first cover. It's important to note that recovery and repair do not mean the same thing: a drive containing donor parts can be used to recover your data one time but cannot be trusted again after.
It’s the class that determines the method, cost and honest probability, so the class is decided prior to quoting. No other attribute of the drive matters as much as which of the four classes it is assigned to.
Clicking / grinding / whining faintly / not making a sound. Failure of something physical inside. Must be opened and worked on at a workbench. In this class, each additional power cycle results in a loss of readable surface area.
No sound on initial application of power. Short circuit or surge through the board most commonly. The disk itself often remains untouched: the adaptive ROM is transferred to a matching board and the drive is imaged normally.
Spins up like a champ, then spouts rubbish (wrong capacity), or says there's no model name, or doesn't say anything at all. There is damage to the modules loaded to boot when the drive starts up. None of this is due to a physical issue with the device itself, and no matter how hard you try, software can never fix this.
There is no physical damage and the file systems used for your data are broken. Your files were deleted. It has been formatted. A partition resize failed. A table has become corrupted. This is the cheapest type of recovery and the kind of recovery most often botched by someone trying to fix it themselves.
It is difficult to get people to spend money on this step, but it matters most.
A failing disk has a limited number of good read cycles remaining. Each time it is turned back on, each time a repair tool accesses it, each time you do “one more thing”, you're spending part of that allocation. And if it is a mechanical failure, you're spending part of that allocation scoring the surface where your data resides.
The first step in this process involves creating an exact copy of each sector using special hardware-based imaging tools. These tools will bypass damaged sectors versus trying to read through the damage. All steps after that are done based on the image created above. If a particular reconstruction method does not work, we always revert back to our original copy and attempt another method. The bottom line is that nothing we do will ever be able to reduce how much data could be recovered when the drive first arrived, which no software running on the failing disk itself can guarantee.
The one thing that ends a recovery. Running chkdsk, a repair program or a rebuild against a drive that is failing physically. This will write data to the disk you are trying to recover, and if your disk has surface problems, you can expect to lose part of your data. So, if the drive is making any new noises, shut it down!
Donor matching is based on family, head count and firmware revision rather than capacity, which is why the model number on the label matters more than the size. Below are some families we see most often and what each tends to do when it fails.
The most misunderstood aspect of mechanical recovery. This impacts how long a job takes more than anything else.
If the head stack of a drive fails it must be replaced with a stack from a functioning drive. It is reasonable for people to assume that when you buy a new stack, you would get the exact same model number as your failed unit. But two units (even though they may carry the same model number) can have different head configurations, platter counts and firmware revisions. A mismatch of any of these factors means the replacement stack cannot read the surface that it sits upon.
The key to being able to use a donor is that it has to match based upon head map, family and firmware generation. That's why what's labelled on your drive is more important than how large the drive is. We maintain an inventory of the families of drives that are sent from this area in the greatest numbers: the Barracuda and WD Blue generations, the Toshiba MQ 2.5-inch range, and a deliberate reserve of older IDE and early SATA families, due to fenland industrial equipment still continuing to produce these.
Sourcing a donor, if required, does affect how long the recovery may take, but the outcome remains unchanged. At the time of diagnosis you will know if a donor is in stock or needs to be obtained elsewhere. Whether we have a donor in stock or need to obtain one will also be reflected in the written quote. Why “repair” is the wrong word →
This is less a list of what we can do than an honest account of this one bench, in this one area.
There are two main areas that generate business and they are as unalike as night and day. From the south of the county we get single 2.5-inch external drives & laptop disks containing work that doesn't exist anywhere else: a thesis, a sequencing run, four years of work on a doctorate stored on a drive bought in a supermarket. These jobs are technically ordinary jobs but what is not ordinary about them is that there is no other copy of the data and usually a submission deadline exists somewhere within the calendar.
You can see a big difference when coming at this from north of Ely. The packhouse line controllers, the weighbridge PCs, the grain store and irrigation system computerised controls, the yard CCTV recorders: all of these have been running continuously for a decade or more in cold, damp & dusty conditions. Therefore, all of these units arrive very dirty and often corroded. Many of them use an older IDE or early SATA interface since the device they control cannot communicate with newer technology. Neither one of these areas is hopeless. They both require different care and different donors.
This information is published rather than quoted case by case; therefore, you may compare our pricing directly with anyone else’s pricing.
The cost of recovering one hard drive is priced from £300 +VAT, regardless of what type of unit it is (internal, external or laptop) and regardless of the nature of the failure (whether it is a board issue or a failure of the heads). If the recovered hard drive was part of a RAID configuration, NAS or server then the job price would be classified as “array work” and would begin at £500 +VAT.
However, it's the deposit that differs. In most cases, you only pay if we recover your data. If we fail to recover your data, then you owe nothing. However, when a hard drive needs to be opened or requires parts from another unit to successfully complete the recovery process, those costs are incurred at the start of service; therefore, we require a 50 per cent deposit prior to commencing work. The remaining 50 per cent will only be collected once the job has been completed successfully. You will know which of the two applies before agreeing to anything.
Turn the drive off and let it stay off. Clicking means the read/write heads cannot find their servo information. Each subsequent power-up risks marking up the surface the contents of your files are sitting on. How long it had been operating after the initial “noise” has a greater impact on the final results than anything we do afterwards.
No, and the difference matters. A drive with donor parts installed is good for recovering your data one time only; it is not a drive to get back into operation. Anyone offering to fix or restore a mechanical failure in a disk and deliver a working disk is describing something that doesn't exist.
Normally, and it depends almost entirely on whether the drive was powered on when it fell. A drop while it is powered off often leaves nothing worse than a stuck head stack. If it falls during an active write operation then you could potentially have damaged the platters. That kind of damage is permanent.
A lack of noise generally indicates the problem lies with the logic board and not with the physical mechanical components. The logic board would be the less expensive component to replace. The adaptive ROM data is transferred to a matching replacement board, and the drive can then be imaged normally. There are also times when the issue may not be related to the board itself. In those cases, the issue may be due to stiction. Stiction occurs when the heads bond to the surface of the disk.
It takes one to two working days from your approval date (and no longer than four, donor work included). You will know if a donor needs to be acquired before you decide whether to go ahead.
Please only include the hard drive of the computer (we do not accept computers/laptops/servers/Macs). Please remove the drive and pack it in an anti-static bag with sufficient padding (if you don't want to open your machine, any local computer repair shop can extract the hard drive in minutes, and most will do it while you wait).
One fixed price of £300 +VAT per single drive, for which a written agreement is made after the free diagnostic and does not change thereafter. The cost of bench work and the cost of replacement parts where the problem is mechanical, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data.