If your hard disk drive is making ticking noises, takes ages to start up or Windows has stopped recognising it, your files are usually all still on it. Swindon Data Recovery takes in failed hard disks from homes and businesses in and around Swindon, Chippenham and the rest of Wiltshire. Every hard disk we get in is examined by us for free, and we then issue one fixed written price before any repairs are started.
Complimentary diagnostics on every single hard disk recovery job. We will issue one fixed price written quote before any work begins.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. For electronic and mechanical failures as well as all chip-level work, 50% is taken upfront and the balance is only paid if we recover your data, while all BitLocker, ransomware, DVR and forensic jobs are paid upfront once you accept the fixed quote. Please see the data recovery cost page for full pricing details.
Every hard disk recovery job comes down to matching the symptoms to whatever has gone wrong, and the twenty we've listed here cover nearly everything that ends up on our bench.
The "walking" motion of the head assembly as it searches back and forth for servo marks it can no longer read, which is the classic sign of head failure.
It could be down to a seized motor, heads stuck to a platter, or electronic damage caused by a power surge, and all three of these silent failures display the same symptoms.
Although there may be power reaching the drive, it will never announce its presence, due to corrupted firmware or dead electronics which have silenced the drive.
Each attempt the spindle motor makes to turn against jammed heads or locked bearings puts more strain on them and twists the mechanical components further, so you should stop immediately.
Degradation of the disk surface that keeps freezing Explorer and causing copy operations to stop, and which gets worse with each passing hour the drive remains running.
When a drive's internal mapping fails it will report zero GB available or leave you stuck at "busy", and this is a classic faulty state for Seagate drives.
If the drive falls while the disks are still spinning the heads crash into them, and the damage this does is instant and mechanical, so every time you try to get into the drive you make the physical damage worse.
Heavy storms and poor quality power adapters destroy the controller board in your hard drive. Hard drive electronics repair with a ROM transfer is the fix for this type of problem, where the Read Only Memory (ROM) is moved from the broken board onto a replacement board.
A major portion of the data that was stored on the drive will still be intact underneath the new file table. How much got written to the drive after that is what decides how many of those files are recovered.
Although the partition table has been erased or damaged, all the files it listed are still there untouched and are just waiting to be rebuilt.
We have seen too many of the infamous 3TB Barracudas whose head stacks failed so often, and we always keep matching donor head stacks for these drives on our shelf.
As soon as the relocation logs fill up the firmware zone, both Blues and Greens become extremely sluggish, and clearing out the firmware zone via the diagnostic port resolves this issue.
When hard drives are stored in lofts, the heads can end up stuck to the platters, and freeing them without doing more damage is slow work that needs great patience and caution on our head-swap bench.
In laptops that fall over, it's typically the Toshiba MQ-series and Travelstar drives inside that take the brunt of the impact, and it's their heads that get hurt most.
A slow moving drive that still loads is dying bit by bit, and it can be saved by imaging it now and letting the weak spots go to last when we do this.
The Seagate 2.5 inch shingled drive slows down severely during extended writes and also develops bad sectors, so we image it with pacing that allows for SMR.
Toshiba's small desktop drive often develops a motor lockup after long periods of use, and to read it we remove the platters from the original housing and put them into a donor chassis.
Old age or static damage can destroy the preamp chip on the heads themselves, and the only way to get past this problem is a full donor head swap.
Repeatedly trying to power up a clicking hard disk in hope will grind visible arcs across the platter surface, and with whatever is left, we image around these damaged areas.
WD's 7mm thin laptop drives don't have much room inside them, so if one falls off your desk just once, the heads have to be replaced before it can be imaged.
Each hard disk has spinning disks called 'platters', which are read by a "floating head" assembly held over an incredibly thin air gap (measured in nanometres). That level of precision fails suddenly, and each attempt at retrying the failing drive will have its own cost. Our engineers strip, assess and image Seagate, Western Digital (WD), Toshiba, HGST and Samsung mechanisms every day, and these could have come from anywhere, including slim laptop drives, desktop workhorses or surveillance recorders that ran for years. When your drive is making a clicking noise or has recently been dropped, the golden rule is to turn it off and leave it off. If you were searching for a hard drive retrieval service then this is what you found, and we use lab equipment to do retrievals rather than hopeful software.
We get hard drives in with worn heads, motors that seized in the middle of a job and firmware that has lost its own address map, and quite a few arrive after a storm because a power spike cooked the controller board, so hard drive electronics repair is a specialism of its own. In order to recover data from a burnt printed circuit board (PCB), it has to be either repaired or swapped out for a matching donor board, and then the drive's unique ROM from the damaged board is transferred onto the replacement. Once this is complete, the contents of the hard drive are imaged, sector by sector, using equipment specifically designed for unstable disks. The rest of our bench work comes from accidental deletion of partitions, formatting the wrong disk and corruption that has crept into the file system over time, and these jobs come from customers in Swindon, Calne and Royal Wootton Bassett. Although Wiltshire makes up the largest part of our bench work, tracked post means we are able to offer hard drive recovery nationwide, and to date we've received hard disk drives from every manufacturer and from every corner of the UK. As long as a drive is packaged properly, it can be posted safely to our lab from anywhere in the UK.
If a lab does not honestly report its tool list then it is unlikely they will give you an honest result either. The following is a list of all the tools we use on every single hard drive job:
This is the industry standard diagnostic unit that opens up the hidden service mode on a hard drive. Once inside service mode our technicians can rebuild translators, repair defect lists and perform firmware surgery, and it is the benchmark the rest of the trade measures itself against.
Each failing mechanism is captured head by head, utilising live current monitoring as each sector is read, with per-sector timeouts and retry rules that can never be duplicated through software.
Once the lid has been removed, the head-swap bench takes over, and all the platters and head stacks are handled with proper tools each step of the way.
Combs, lifters and alignment jigs handle moving the head assembly and entire platter pack to a new chassis, and at no point during this process does one surface ever touch another.
The donor shelves have been organised by model number, firmware generation and factory code, so finding the right head stack or PCB for a rebuild takes only minutes instead of weeks.
Hard drive electronics repair is carried out under a microscope, and any surge-damaged circuit boards are either repaired or replaced, with the drive's unique ROM (Read-Only Memory) copied from your original board onto the donor board.
Because our physical read-only enforcement hardware always sits between the original drive and our bench, there is no way anything we run can write even a single byte back to the original hard drive.
Each item mentioned above was taken directly from our intake log rather than a catalogue, and it is interesting how many were put in the log the hard way. The ST3000DM001 has clearly shown itself to be the textbook case of a head stack failure, and our donor shelf shows just that. The DM-series Barracuda drives freeze at "busy" due to firmware faults. WD Blue drives commonly lose their circuit boards to thunderstorm damage and their heads to a bump or knock, which provides a lot of work for our hard drive electronics repair bench. The shingled ST500LM030/ST2000LM015 pair will crawl for a long time before finally giving up the ghost. We maintain matched donors for each of these models, and twenty-year-old IDE drives continue to read perfectly fine on our legacy shelf.
Western Digital's colour coding (the Blue in the household tower, the Black next to the gamer, the Red in the NAS bays, the Purple watching the yard) is something we see in an average week, and there is one WD model that gets imaged more than any other, the WD10EZEX Blue. The slow fault on a WD is a service area clogged with relocation records, which lets the drive still be recognised by the system but leaves it running at a snail's pace. Once this has happened we go into the manufacturer's service mode and clear the blockage, and then the platters image normally. The other big group of WD jobs is damage from knocks and drops, and we put that right by fitting matched donor heads on the head-swap bench.
No logo turns up on our bench more often than this one. The Barracuda series, especially the DM generation (the ST2000DM008 and the notorious ST3000DM001 head eater), fails in two distinct ways. First, the drive will hang in its firmware and report busy or zero capacity even though it is otherwise mechanically sound, and this type of failure is fixed through the diagnostic terminal with no need to take the top cover off. Second, when one of these drives takes a knock it will start clicking, and it needs to go to our head-swap bench for donor heads before we can image it. Both of these are a normal part of our weekly workload and generally have good recovery rates, and the shingled ST500LM030 laptop drives add a third bad habit, as they crawl so badly that people think they are dead.
The Deskstars and Travelstars around today have had three different owners, IBM, then Hitachi (from 2003), and HGST, which is now part of Western Digital. Drives from every era still turn up out of offices and lofts here in Wiltshire. The reason they fail usually has something to do with the head stack wearing down unevenly, where one surface begins to produce errors and slow reads and in the end the disk will go into a 'tick' state rather than mount. Imaging is also performed on a surface-by-surface basis, so anything the good heads can read is saved before a donor stack takes over for the remainder. The model we know most about is the HTS725050A7E630 Travelstar.
Before being sold off to Hitachi in 2003, Deskstar and Travelstar were both part of IBM's product line, and as such many of the surviving IDE drives are still around today, coming from tower computers that have been retired or laptops that have been put away in boxes. Some of these older drives are the only places where old account information and photos can still be found. Twenty years or so after they were stored away, the spindles seize and the lubricant goes hard, causing the heads to stick to the platters. Because of this every single one of them has to be checked over on our repair bench before we can even attempt to power it up. We keep the PATA adapters needed to connect these drives, along with the period donor drives that sit on our legacy shelf. An IBM logo alone is no indication that your data is gone.
Get a quote first, by phone or with the free online diagnostic. The drive needs to be removed from your computer before you send it to us. Unsure how? Contact us at 0800 689 0668, or find a local PC repair shop that will remove the drive for a small charge.
Is your hard drive still fitted inside a computer, laptop or server? In all cases it needs to come out before you post anything (from a server, that means every disk, labelled with its bay order). This is because the lab works only with bare drives and does not do drive removals. Taking a hard drive out of a machine can usually be done with a few screws, and most local repair shops in Swindon will do it for very little. The one firm limit is storage soldered onto a motherboard, which is outside our scope. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first. Get a quote first, by phone or with the free online diagnostic, before you post anything.
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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