It's Sod's law of storage: the disk holding the only copy is always the one that slips off the desk. Clicking, beeping, flashing or silent, portable and mains-powered externals of every badge reach us from Faringdon, Calne and the whole M4 corridor, and they leave as readable files on new media.
A free diagnostic on every external drive job. You get one fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Electronic and mechanical failures and chip-level work are 50% upfront, with the balance only if we recover your data, while BitLocker, ransomware, DVR and forensic jobs are paid upfront once you accept the fixed quote. You'll find full pricing on the data recovery cost page.
Every external drive job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault, and these twenty cover almost everything that arrives on the bench.
The classic way a portable drive dies: the heads hit the platters, and every further power-up gambles with whatever is left.
The bridge, electronics or firmware have gone down; the disk is still alive in there, but nothing is translating for it.
Yanked cables and unplugging mid-write tear the file table, but the files sitting behind the error are fine.
Stuck heads or a straining spindle. Disconnect it and resist the urge to try a second time.
Dead electronics or a failed bridge, imaged through the original board or by working around it entirely.
On Passports and Elements the board is part of the cipher chain, so swap the enclosure and you get static instead of folders.
Mains-powered desktops die with their power bricks, which is sometimes the cheapest fix in the building and sometimes the fiddliest.
Spreading bad sectors slow copies to treacle, but hardware imagers can outrun the decay.
Formats and deletions on externals recover well, as long as the drive is parked straight away.
Platters can withstand far more than owners fear. They are cleaned, treated and transplanted on the head-swap bench.
Seagate's slim STEA and STKM portables start clicking after knocks, and donor head stacks for them come straight off the shelf.
LaCie STFR Ruggeds live in camera bags until one landing too many. Orange bumper or not, it's a standard rescue.
Toshiba's micro-B socket loosens after years of plugging in and out; it gets reflowed, or bypassed for the imaging run.
T5s, T7s and SanDisk Extremes fail electronically without making a sound. These are flash-bench cases in an external's shell.
Years of yanking it out without ejecting pile up corruption until the drive will no longer mount, and the volume is then reassembled from a complete capture.
Iomega's orphaned externals still turn up with family archives on board. Inside are standard mechanisms, recovered like any modern drive.
The micro-B port rips off the board when someone trips over the cable. The pads are rebuilt, or the drive is imaged directly.
The SMR drive inside many recent portables crawls, stalls and drops off mid-copy, so it is imaged with pacing tuned for shingled media.
A portable pressed into service as a mini-server wears out years early, because continuous duty is exactly what NAS drives were designed for.
Upright desktop externals knocked flat mid-write can take head damage without ever leaving the desk, and head-swap bench work follows.
Portable drives travel in rucksacks, share car seats and perch on the edges of desks, and a spinning mechanism that lands on laminate usually lands on its heads, which is why clicking after a drop is the sound we hear most. WD Passports and Elements, Seagate Expansions and One Touches, Toshiba Canvios, LaCie Ruggeds and Buffalo MiniStations arrive every week; inside each one is an ordinary drive, so everything the main bench can do applies. External work isn't a sideline here: by volume, it's the biggest category in the building.
Take a modern WD portable out of its case, connect it straight to SATA and you'll see pure noise. That's because the hardware encryption lives on the USB interface board and scrambles everything written to the platters by design. Half the panicked second-opinion calls we take start exactly there. For us it's routine: recovery goes through the original bridge electronics, or the cipher chain is rebuilt around a donor board, and your folder structure comes back exactly as you left it.
Every external has a bare internal drive inside it, so this same full drive bench applies here as well, along with the bridge specialists:
This is the most commonly used diagnostic unit in the industry for opening a hard drive's hidden service mode. Once the service mode is open, our technicians can rebuild translators, repair defect lists and perform firmware surgery. It is the bench standard that everyone else in the trade compares themselves to.
Our equipment captures failing mechanisms one head at a time, with live current monitoring while it reads through each sector, and timeout and retry rules set for each individual sector. These cannot be copied by any piece of software.
After the cover comes off, the head-swap bench takes over, and our technicians use the proper tools at each stage when handling the platters and head stacks.
When the head assembly and the whole platter pack have to be moved to a new chassis, our combs, lifters and alignment jigs let us do it without any surface coming into contact with any other surface during the whole process.
We have organised our donor shelves by model number, firmware generation and factory code, so finding the right head stack or PCB for a rebuild takes minutes rather than weeks.
Self-encrypting portable drives (WD's in particular) are imaged through the original interface bridge, or else the cipher chain is recreated so the imaging can bypass it.
Replacement interface boards for these come straight out of our own stock, and they're matched so that the drive's encryption survives the swap.
By sheer numbers, WDBYVG-era Passports and STEA Expansions are the most recovered units in this building, with T7-class portable SSDs gaining share every quarter. Keep in mind that WD's encryption sits on the USB board, so when a bridge fails the cipher chain has to be carried over rather than just swapping the caddy. Seagate's slim portables tend to answer a knock by clicking, while the older Iomega eGo and GDHDU units that keep turning up from the back of drawers strip down to plain standard mechanisms that our donors already cover.
No one responds to calls about Iomega anymore. The brand went through EMC and then Lenovo and the product line more or less stopped, but the hard drives still keep arriving with us in large numbers, many of them the colourful portable eGo series, some the GDHDU-series desktop models and others the Home Media boxes that were used for years as the family archive. An orphaned device doesn't mean an unrecoverable device. As soon as you get the Iomega outer shell off, you will find that the mechanism inside is just a standard Samsung, Seagate or WD drive, and we already cover those on our donor shelf. So an Iomega hard disk drive goes down the same path to be imaged as anything bought last month. Get a quote first, by phone or with the free online diagnostic. Then post the entire unit tracked and insured, or drop it at the Oxford lab's reception, no appointment needed. Please don't open the enclosure yourself, because opening older enclosures without damaging them is part of what we do.
LaCie provided portable storage for the traveller: Rugged units that were carried back and forth between shoot locations, d2 desktop units installed under edit bays, and Porsche Design units sitting on studio shelves. It was this same mobility which killed the units. The Rugged units are as sturdy as they look with their bright orange casings, but if you drop one while it is still spinning it will lose its heads, however tough the casing is, and the desktop models tend to lose their Thunderbolt or USB-C interface electronics long before the disk inside dies. Since LaCie is now part of Seagate, there is no longer a way to get them repaired by sending them back to a factory. So each time we need to bring one of these units home it takes a lab, where we open the outer case, make an image of the bare disk, fit donor heads first where the fall calls for it and restore the projects from the image.
The My Passport is best thought of as one complete product. Because the USB port is built right into the drive's own controller board, and the hardware encryption is done on the same chip, when the electronics quit working your files stay encrypted and locked away. You cannot simply move the drive into another enclosure (caddy) either, as you will get nothing but garbage (random characters) in place of file and folder names. The bench keeps donor boards for both generations of My Passport (WDBYVG and WDBPKJ) and moves the cipher chain over intact, which is what decides whether a particular My Passport stays 'undetected' or mounts properly. The mains-powered My Books go wrong in a different way, usually through their power bricks and bridge boards, while the drive inside is in perfect health.
The portable MiniStations (HD-PCF models most of all) suffer from typical 2.5-inch injuries such as drops, micro-USB sockets working loose and bad sectors developing month by month. Desktop DriveStations typically fail at the power supply or interface board long before failing at the disk. Hardware-based encryption is present in some MiniStation versions. Once you provide your password, this layer is opened during recovery, so the recovered data can be read as normal files. Regardless of which version arrives, the process to recover data remains the same. We remove the outer casing and create a full sector image, then perform a standard recovery from that image.
Most customers get a quote first, by phone or with the free online diagnostic, and then post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive (from a server, every disk, each labelled with its bay), as we don't offer a drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (for example T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops), only drives that can be removed and sent to us. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
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