A drive that is silent, a drive the machine cannot see, a drive that reads for thirty seconds and stops and a drive that opens up empty all get called the same thing. They are four different faults with four different routes across this bench, and only one of them needs the clean bench opened.
All four versions of dead cost the same. One hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT either way, put in writing once the free diagnostic closes, 2 working days after your parcel reaches the bench.
The word gets used for four separate conditions that share almost nothing beyond the sinking sensation that comes with them. Working out which one is in front of you is the entire purpose of the diagnostic, and it is free because guessing at it wastes everybody time and money.
Plug it in and the drive stays silent. That is electronics or mechanics rather than data loss: a shorted protection diode from the wrong power supply, a failed motor driver chip, a preamplifier gone inside the sealed part, or a spindle that has seized after years in a warm cupboard. The platters are usually untouched and the route in is through the board or the clean bench.
The heads are trying to leave their parking ramp and cannot fly, so the drive gives up and retries. It is the most quoted symptom in this trade and the most misunderstood: it is not a warning that the drive is about to die; it is the drive telling you it already has. Each further attempt drags damaged heads across the surface again.
A drive that sounds healthy and is entirely invisible to the machine is normally stuck in its own firmware. The service area, where the drive keeps its defect maps, translator and adaptive settings, lives on the platters rather than in a chip, and when part of it becomes unreadable the drive never finishes starting up. Nothing has to be opened to put that right.
The machine sees something calling itself a string of symbols, or reporting zero capacity, or claiming to be a different model altogether. That is the same firmware problem wearing a different face, and it is one of the more recoverable faults on this page. Every hour it spends powered on and confused is an hour of no benefit whatsoever.
The drive shows up, folders open, and then a copy that started at a sensible speed collapses to a crawl and freezes the machine. Weak heads and growing bad sectors do that. A normal computer will retry the same failing sector for half a minute at a time, where an imager gives it one attempt, notes the address and comes back to it later.
The cheapest outcome on the list and a surprisingly common one. Hardware is fine, the partition is intact or nearly so, and the data has been deleted, formatted over, lost to a reinstall or hidden behind a partition table that no longer describes the disk. This is software work from start to finish and it keeps the full no fix, no fee footing.
Take the four in turn, because they run in the order that matters. A drive with no power at all is an electronics or mechanics job. The board comes off, the protection circuitry is checked, and where a replacement board is needed the original ROM has to be moved across, because the adaptive settings for that specific head stack live in it and a board from an identical model will not do on its own. Where the fault is inside the sealed section it goes to the clean bench for a donor head stack or a motor. This is the route that needs parts, hours and a controlled environment.
A drive that powers up but is never detected is nearly always firmware. The service area is read module by module using tooling that talks to the drive on its own terminal rather than through the operating system, the damaged modules are rebuilt or regenerated, and the drive is brought back to a state where it will present itself and be imaged. Nothing is opened, and that matters commercially as well as technically, because firmware work stays inside the no fix, no fee guarantee where clean bench work does not.
A drive that is detected but will not read properly is an imaging job. It goes onto hardware built for the purpose, which reads in a chosen order, controls the timeout so a failing sector cannot lock up the process, retries deliberately rather than blindly, and maps the areas that need a second and third approach from a different direction. The output is an image, and the file system work happens on that.
A drive that is detected, readable and empty is software from beginning to end. It is copied for safety and then the deleted structures, the old partition tables or the previous file system are found on the copy. No parts, no clean bench, and the fastest turnaround of the four.
Here is the part nobody else will tell you plainly: the band does not move. Any one hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT whichever of those four routes it takes, because the price is set by what you sent rather than by how hard the day turns out to be. What does change is what you are agreeing to before the work starts. Logical faults and firmware work carry the guarantee in full. Anything involving the electronics, the mechanics, board-level or chip-level work takes 50% of the quoted figure upfront, because donor drives and clean bench time are spent whether or not the drive gives its data up. The line the network uses is worth quoting exactly: no fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs.
Almost every drive that arrives here in a worse state than it started arrived that way because of something well-meant. Repeated power cycling is the big one. A drive that clicks is dragging heads across the surface each time it tries, and the difference between one that clicked twice and one that clicked thirty times is the difference between a routine head swap and a platter that has been scored past reading. If it made a noise you have not heard before, take the power off and leave it off.
The freezer trick refuses to die and it deserves to. It comes from a specific fault on drives that have not been sold for twenty years, and on modern hardware what it reliably produces is condensation inside a sealed assembly with tolerances measured in nanometres. Rubber mallets, dropping the drive on its edge and running it upside down are variations on the same theme. A drive with a mechanical fault does not need percussion; it needs the case opened under filtered air by somebody with the right donor on the shelf.
USB caddies and cheap adapters are the quiet one. A drive that is struggling draws more current than a healthy one and a bus-powered enclosure often cannot supply it, so the drive resets partway through every copy and each reset is another unnecessary cycle. If you are testing whether a drive still reads, do it once, on a proper power supply, and stop the moment anything sounds wrong. Software repair tools belong in the same paragraph. Anything offering to fix, initialise or rebuild is writing to the disk, and writing to a drive with a hardware fault is how a recoverable case becomes a partial one.
Drives reach this bench from the estates off the A329M, from home offices in Crowthorne and Sandhurst, from studios around Wokingham and Ascot and from London commuters whose machine gave up somewhere between Bracknell and Waterloo. All of them travel the same way: unbolted from the laptop, tower, iMac or recorder, wrapped so nothing shifts, and posted tracked to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH. It is about forty minutes down the A322 and the A3 if you would rather drive it in during office hours, and next working day by post if you would not.
You hear from us as soon as it is booked in. The free diagnostic closes 2 working days after arrival, never sooner, and the written figure follows it. Related routes into the bench are hard drive recovery for the everyday version of this job, clicking drive recovery for the noise, drive not detected for the invisible ones, and data recovery cost for the bands in full.
Take the power off, unbolt the drive, and post it in. The diagnostic tells you which of the four you have, and costs nothing.
Almost every job on this bench arrived as a parcel. Tracked, insured post is the gentlest way to move storage that is already in trouble, and a box handed in around Bracknell, Wokingham or Ascot is normally on the Guildford bench the next working day.
Is the storage still bolted into a machine — laptop, tower, iMac, MacBook, rack server, a DVR under the till? Free it first and send the bare unit. Stripping hardware is not something this lab does, though it is ten minutes' work for any repair shop on your high street. There is a single case with no way round it: memory chips soldered flat onto the mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon machines and certain ultrabooks are built. Where the storage cannot be unbolted, there is no parcel to make up.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
The name on the parcel wants to be Guildford Data Recovery. Driving it over from Bracknell is roughly forty minutes on the A322 then the A3; posting it costs you a stamp and a day. Either way, a message goes out to you as soon as it is logged onto the system, and two working days later the diagnostic is finished.
Unsure whether something should go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 while the lid is still open, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it tell you.