A hard drive that makes a clicking noise, buzzing noise, no longer spins or simply disappeared silently from your PC does not necessarily mean your files have been lost. Our engineers recover faulty HDDs for families & businesses throughout Swansea & Swansea Bay: the cost of diagnosis is free and you will know our fixed price in writing prior to us removing a single screw.
Diagnostic is always provided free with every single hard drive job. One fixed price quotation is given in writing in advance of any work being undertaken.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. This is true of all our services except for failure of electrical/mechanical components, chip level repairs, DVRs and forensic analysis. Our full price list can be seen at the cost of data recovery page.
Each and every hard drive will be diagnosed by matching its symptoms to the fault. There are fifteen common faults which account for virtually all of those that reach the bench at this facility.
The failed read/write heads are scanning for a reference signal that they cannot find (this sound is indicative of damage to the head stack).
Damage has occurred either to the spindle motor (i.e., "it is seized"), the heads have become stuck to the platter surface, or the circuit board was damaged as a result of an electrical surge (i.e., "spike"). These are three silent failures sharing one symptom, each resulting in no audible activity when attempting to start up.
The power goes into the drive, but the drive does not tell the BIOS its name: either corrupt firmware or dead electronics.
Stuck heads (or a jammed bearing) are causing strain on the motor; every attempt to start it again causes additional damage. Stop now before you cause further damage.
Surface wear (bad sector multiplication) causes stalled copies and Explorer hangs, and will get worse with each use of the drive.
The internal mapping of addresses has failed and the drive is reporting 0GB. The drive may sit at 'busy' indefinitely. This is very typical of Seagates.
When the drive drops from desk height during a spin cycle the heads hit the platters with a great deal of force. The result is instant physical/mechanical damage.
A power supply surge in a thunderstorm or a low cost power brick can burn out the printed circuit board (PCB) for the controller, which usually carries the drive's unique read-only memory (ROM).
Typically, the data below is intact. The success of recovery depends on how much else has been written to that space since.
This occurs when a drive loses track of where its partitions begin while all the content below remains intact.
As Seagate's 3TB Barracuda is notorious for failing its heads, we keep donor units for the model permanently stocked to pull parts from.
WD's Blue and Green hard-drives will either "crawl" or become unresponsive as soon as the relocation logs clog up the firmware area; clearing these through the diagnostic port fixes this issue.
Hard-drives left in lofts for long periods of time experience stiction issues whereby the heads get stuck to the platters; freeing these involves very sensitive and precise bench repair.
Travelstar and Toshiba MQ-series 2.5" HDs are going down (head first, naturally) if your laptop drops.
The hard drive is still mounting, but takes an eternity to access data, so it's in a failure mode. Imaging the failing drive at this point (weakest parts last) is what saves it while still alive.
The mechanical part of every disk drive consists of many polished discs that rotate beneath "read/write heads". The heads are closer to the disc surfaces than smoke is thick. Once something in that mechanism gives way, every subsequent reboot is an effort to gamble with your data. We see these brands (Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, Hitachi & Samsung) pass through our lab daily: small 2.5" laptop drives; larger drives for desktops; and 24/7 surveillance type drives. If a drive begins to click when spinning or has been dropped at any time, it should be disconnected and placed in a drawer. Not back into the computer: attempting to use it again could severely damage the disks and significantly reduce what can be recovered.
Each week, we receive failed heads, motors that are broken, burnt-out controller boards due to surges, corrupted firmware, spreading bad sectors, accidental format or partition deletions done in panic: all coming from Swansea, Llanelli and Neath. All donor components are obtained from our matching component library, and each recoverable sector is transferred onto dedicated hardware imagers that are specifically engineered to capture data from dying drives. If you're looking for hard drive retrieval near me, then this is a lab-grade level of that service; recovery software will never be run on a drive that can't safely operate.
A hard drive lab is only as good as its bench, and every single one of our jobs goes through a full professional lab with all the proper tools for your data recovery:
Translator repair, defect remapping, and unlocking of service area locks using firmware level access to manufacturer service mode, on the industry-standard bench.
Imaging unstable drives requires the ability to capture data head by head using current monitoring, adaptive timeouts and retry logic that can't be replicated in software-based imaging solutions.
A bench used to open drives (the heads and platters are only touched at this workbench).
Custom made combs, lifts and alignment fixtures enable safe movement of a head assembly and entire platter pack into place in another chassis without the heads ever physically contacting the platters.
Stocked, indexable inventory of donor drives covering models, firmware families and site codes, thus eliminating the need to order matching head stacks or boards.
Each surge-cooked PC board is repaired/replaced under magnification. The unique ROM chip from the damaged HD is then transferred to the donor board.
We only read from the original hardware, with physical restrictions: all of your source data will run through an additional layer (write-blocker) to prevent any changes from being made to it via our process.
Those part numbers are not just decoration; they're the drives we see on this bench most weeks and several of them have famous flaws: the ST3000DM001 is a by-word for head stack failure; firmware issues cause some DM-series Barracudas to lock at 'busy'; and surges can make it easy for WD Blues' boards to fail (knocks will do the same with their heads). We maintain matched spare donor parts for each of the above, and two decades old IDE drives still read fine on the legacy shelf.
Blue for the family tower, Black under the gamer's desk, Red in the NAS bays, Purple at the back of cameras: WD's colour code comes into this lab weekly and the WD10EZEX Blue may well be the most imaged drive within the building. WD has a typical slow failure, it is a service area filled up with relocation records that leave a drive detected but glacial; that is untangled in manufacturer service mode after which the platters will image normally. Dropped and knocked WDs are the other caseload: matched donor heads fitted on the bench.
No badge has been seen sitting on that bench as much as Seagate. Barracudas (ST2000DM008s) of the DM generation and the infamous head hungry Barracuda (ST3000DM001) have two defining conditions for the bench: firmware freeze, when a perfectly working mechanical unit is stuck in 'busy' or reports zero capacity and is resolved via the diagnostics connector without opening the case, and post-knock clicking, where we need to do some donor head work on the bench before we can image it. These two conditions are part of every day for us and provide good results.
The Deskstars and Travelstars had all taken on three labels (IBM's, Hitachi's label from 2003, and then HGST's under Western Digital), and every iteration still comes to light from South Wales lofts and office clearouts. They are defined by the slow degeneration of their head stack; one surface will begin to produce errors prior to the others until the drive "ticks" as opposed to mounting. We take an image of each surface individually, and bank what the strong heads are able to read before a donor stack is placed into service to read what was abandoned by the weakest head. The HTS541010A9E680 Travelstar has been the most common patient of these.
Deskstar and Travelstar were part of the IBM line until Hitachi took over the Deskstar/Travelstar brands in 2003; so as you continue to find IDE era disk units (from retired tower computers & laptops) hidden away in your loft, these contain the last remaining record of what used to be your old accounts or photo albums. After sitting in a box with no power source for 20 years these disks will seize their spindle motor, stiffen their lubricants, and glue the head onto the surface of the disk, that's why all of them are opened on the bench prior to powering up at all. The older style PATA interface adapter boards & other vintage donor parts are stored on the "legacy" shelf, therefore it doesn't matter if there is an IBM logo on the unit itself.
You get a quote first; then you have to pull the drive out of your PC before sending it to us. Not sure? Call us on 0800 689 0668 or visit a local PC repair shop that can do this job for a small fee.
In order to be processed, the failed drive must first be removed from all PCs, laptops, and servers. Once removed, the drive can be sent (from a server, every disk must be pulled and individually labelled for its bay prior to being sent), as we are unable to accept any devices with the drive installed in a PC, laptop or server. We do however accept a single external drive whole, and require that this device include both the drive and cable/power supply. We also do not provide a removal service of failed drives, although a local computer repair shop should remove your drive at a minimal cost (usually just a few screws). The one exception to recovery would be if the drive has been soldered into the motherboard (T2 and Apple Silicon Macs) or if the drive is a laptop's flash memory soldered onto the motherboard. In addition, we do not accept phones or tablets. If you are unsure what type of storage you have, please ring us prior to posting.
First get a quote over the telephone or use our free on-line diagnostic. The majority of customers then have their media sent to us via post, this is tracked and insured.
Do you want to send a drive from your computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please do not send the complete unit of computer or device with a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD) inside. Please remove it and only send the drive itself. For a server, please remove all disks and label them by their bay. We will also not perform removal of internal drives from devices in order to access data. Also, we will not extract data from devices where storage is soldered onto the motherboard (such as T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops). Additionally, we do not recover data from phones and tablets, only drives that can be removed and sent to us. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Clearly mark the parcel with the name Bristol Data Recovery, and when your media has been diagnosed we will call you immediately.
If unsure about what to post, please call us first on 0800 689 0668 (the free phone number), or complete a free online diagnostic.
Diagnostic provided at no charge. Fixed quote. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.