It is nearly always the drive with the only copy on it that gets knocked onto the floor. Portable units and mains-powered ones, of all brands, turn up on this bench ticking, beeping, blinking or completely silent, and they go back out as readable files on fresh media. In addition to LaCie products, which make up an unusually large share of the work here, the low-cost portables people buy from online retailers are also very common, so if you have one of those on your desk, please read the sections below before proceeding with any further testing.
All diagnostics for external drive recovery are provided free of charge. The cost is then fixed in writing before your unit is ever opened: £300 + VAT for each individual hard drive or SSD, NVMe included.
In most cases you would only have to pay if we recover your data. There are some exceptions to this: electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work and physical damage are 50% upfront, with the balance paid only if we recover your data, while DVR/CCTV, forensic, BitLocker and ransomware work is paid upfront. All of the bands and pricing are available on the data recovery cost page.
Reading the symptom back to the failure underneath it is where the work genuinely starts, and this set of thirty covers every parcel that ends up at the Guildford bench except a handful. If yours isn't listed, it can still be recognised: just ring us with a description of the problem and we'll give you a straight answer about the odds before you post anything.
Most external failures fall under one of two categories, and the chances for each one differ greatly. Category one is a failure of the bridge (the small board that converts USB to SATA) or of the firmware on it, and in both of these instances the disk behind the bridge is in perfect health. When this is what has happened, recovery goes well, and it goes very well. Category two is a mechanical failure inside the housing, where the read/write heads or the motor have gone. That is head-swap bench work, with a real price and a real risk attached to it. There is no way to tell from the outside of the case whether you have a category one or a category two problem, which is exactly what the free diagnostic is for.
The standard end result for a portable hard drive. The heads come down onto the platters, and you hear a repeating click each time the drive attempts to find its bearings and fails. Each additional time you power it up uses up some of what is left, so there is absolutely no benefit in trying it once more before getting a quote and posting it.
In order of likelihood: the bridge, the drive electronics or the firmware, while the actual disk carries on turning with nothing left to speak for it. Two of those three are repairable in a matter of hours rather than days, and for this reason nobody should write one of these off based upon what they see on the outside.
If the lead is snatched out while data is being written to the disk, the file table tears, and that is what produces the prompt you then see on every machine. None of your files have moved anywhere. Decline the prompt, unplug the drive, and stop connecting it to your computer(s) to see whether it has recovered by itself.
That's the spindle motor attempting to turn a stack of heads that are stuck to the platters, and being unable to. There is nothing inside an external hard disk unit designed to produce a sound like that. Remove power from the unit, and do not attempt to connect it to a different USB port. Get a quote first, then post the unit in just as it is, or bring it to the Guildford lab (no appointment needed).
Failed bridges and failed drive electronics look identical when viewed from a desk, and trying various USB ports will not tell you which one you have. Imaging is run through the original board where it can be persuaded to work and around the board where it cannot, and which scenario applies will typically be settled within the first hour on the bench.
WD builds it into the bridge hardware instead of the software, therefore the platters contain ciphertext tied to one specific board. If you remove the bare disk from the enclosure and plug it in anywhere else, what you will get is random data with a valid partition table sitting on top. The disk and board have to stay together, and here that is where they remain.
Mains-powered enclosures almost always fail at the power stage, and which component failed decides whether the fix is the cheapest repair in the building or the most fiddly one. In either case the mechanism inside is typically left untouched. Working out which of these two cases you have is what the diagnostic is for, and no price is given before it has been run.
Desktop externals need a certain voltage and polarity, and a similar-looking barrel connector out of a drawer can kill the board in a fraction of a second. Usually the mechanism itself is untouched. The board has to be rebuilt before anything can be read off the platters.
When bad sectors spread, a file copy turns into wading through mud. Imaging hardware works faster than the deterioration does, but only just. If you repeat the same copy that failed yesterday, you feed the deterioration and shorten whatever time is left.
These recover well from an external drive, provided it is put away as soon as possible and stays put away. Everything done to the drive afterwards will reduce what can be recovered, and that includes the scan somebody runs to check whether the files are still there.
One blocked drain and one very wet February bring a few drives in every winter, and the Thames Valley sends its fair share. Platters can withstand much more water than most owners believe. They are cleaned and then stabilised, and if the motor will not turn at all, the pack is moved into a donor chassis on the head-swap bench.
The thinnest 2.5-inch portables respond to almost any knock with clockwork ticking, because there is so little space (clearance) between the top platter and the lid. Donor stacks for those families are stored close to the bench, within reach.
Rubber bumpers provide psychological support more than physical protection. Drop one hard enough while the disk is spinning and it becomes just another head repair dressed up in a nice suit. The case is removed and the disk is treated like any other.
Years of nightly backups cause the port to become loose enough that it only makes contact at the right angle, and then only while the lead is held. At this point it is reflowed, or simply bypassed while the imaging runs off the bare disk.
A T7 or a SanDisk Extreme fails electronically and never clicks; there is nothing physically inside either device that could click. It is flash bench work in an external drive's clothing, and the price follows the SSD band, not the card band.
It has worked fine for years, and then one morning the volume refuses to mount at all. Write caching and a snatched cable have finally caught each other out, so it gets put back together from one complete image instead of being repaired in place.
Freecom, Iomega and many other older makes keep arriving with the family archive on board. With the outer shell removed you'll see an entirely standard mechanism underneath, from a generation we've had spare parts for in our racks since it was current. Just because the brand is no longer around doesn't mean the disk isn't good, and it never has.
Somebody catches the cable with a foot and the port comes loose, pulling some of the pads and tracks away with it. We rebuild those under magnification. If the board is past helping, we take the bare disk out and image it directly on a bench adapter.
With shingled recording now the normal thing in 2.5-inch external drives, a long transfer will fill the cache and then stop while the drive moves data into its overlapping tracks. It looks like a failure and often is not. Imaged at a rate the format will tolerate, most of them work fine.
A portable asked to run continuously will wear out years sooner than expected, because portables weren't made for continuous use. There are drives made specifically for non-stop use, they don't cost significantly more, and they are what a machine that never sleeps should be writing to.
An upright desktop unit that topples onto its side while writing can take considerable damage to the heads without ever leaving the top of the desk. The fall from vertical to horizontal is very short and very quick, and the forces acting on the spinning platter do the rest. What follows is mechanical bench work and not anything electronic, and the desk should bear no blame.
Some cheaper portable SSDs are essentially a cheap memory card mounted behind a bridge chip, and then packaged into a stylish aluminium enclosure. Whatever was genuinely written to the card comes back. The advertised capacity and the true capacity are two different numbers, and only one of them is important.
A long lead, or a hub powered by the bus alone, leaves the drive short of current at precisely the wrong time. It resets mid-write, nobody seems to notice, and the same thing happens again the following week. After months of this the file system is filled with half-finished transactions, and sorting it all out has to be done from a complete image.
The encryption in these enclosures is genuine, and that is what makes it such an issue. With the password it is ordinary work, and the files come back as files. Without the password there is no way in, and you will be told that right away on the first phone call, instead of after two weeks of billable optimism.
An interrupted backup corrupts the bundle until the Mac refuses to use it at all. The band files are repaired first, and then the history is worked through for whatever versions you actually need. Much slower than a restore, however it gives you a lot more back.
Recorders write data in loops, and their disk layout can be whatever the recorder's manufacturer wanted for that model, so there will be no resemblance at all to an ordinary file system. The recordings are still there, however, and are carved out of a raw image, including the worn sectors. Recorder and DVR work is one of the stated exclusions from paying only if we recover your data: it is paid upfront once you accept the fixed quote.
Cheap enclosures are commonly taken apart to get a lower cost hard drive. It's much less well known that some of these bare drives will then not work in a PC at all, because the third pin on the SATA power connector carries a reset line that no enclosure ever used, and some desktop supplies hold it high. The drive looks completely dead although it is in fact healthy. Simply putting a small piece of tape over that pin (or using an adapter with no connection to it) will allow the drive to spin up immediately. Rule out this possibility before assuming anything is wrong with your drive.
Apple's file systems mean nothing to Windows, so when you plug in an Apple formatted drive, Windows reports it as empty and unformatted and offers to format it. If you accept, you'll end up putting a new blank partition structure over the top of a perfectly good one. If you decline, nothing at all has been lost, and when you plug it back into your Mac it will still mount exactly like it did before.
Standalone duplicators copy from one bay to the other at a single button press, and nothing prevents that button being pressed when the disks are in the wrong slots. A blank one will wipe out a full one at full speed. How much of the data survives depends entirely on how far it had got before someone looked at the lights.
Portable drives get put away in all sorts of places: camera bags, laptop sleeves, the unzipped side pocket of a rucksack, and a lot of them end up on a hard floor. If the platters are spinning at the time of the drop, the heads will come to rest on the surface, and the ticking sound that follows is the arm trying to find a position it can no longer find. That is a much more familiar sound in this building than any other. Peel the moulded plastic off a Canvio, an Elements, a My Passport, a Seagate Expansion or One Touch, a Buffalo MiniStation or an Iomega and what you'll see is a completely standard 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch mechanism. This means every technique used on the main drive bench can be used on these portables with no modification needed. The same is true for the cheap portables sold by the pallet online, where UnionSine is the name that shows up most often on the booking sheets. A UnionSine external hard drive not working is very rarely anything out of the ordinary. Inside is just a regular laptop mechanism connected to a simple USB bridge, and the three faults worth considering are the bridge board, the lead or its socket, and the mechanism itself after a fall. None of the ones opened on this bench scramble the disk through the bridge the way Western Digital portables do, making them an easier job than the price might suggest. So a UnionSine hard drive not working after a knock gets exactly the same treatment as a Seagate or a Toshiba would: shell removed, loaded onto the imaging hardware, read slowly, and £300 + VAT for the drive regardless of the badge on the front. Photographers shooting around Ascot, Henley and Windsor keep entire back catalogues on units exactly like this, and each one that comes in is treated as if that is what it has stored on it.
The LaCie name accounts for enough of the traffic to this page to warrant a section of its own, and no other brand has its symptoms misread as often. First look at the noise. A LaCie hard drive beeping is not the sound of your drive dying. It is the spindle motor attempting to spin up to speed, failing and attempting again approximately every second. Two causes between them account for virtually all of it. The first is power. Bus-powered 2.5-inch units (which include the Rugged line and the brushed aluminium Porsche Design mobile drives) get all their power via the USB port, so a frayed cable, an unpowered hub, or a laptop port already powering another three things will give the motor a little less than the current it needs. The second is mechanical: a spindle bearing that will no longer turn freely, or a head stack that has parked down on the platter and is stuck fast. Switching cables won't help in either situation. In the first case repeated attempts merely waste time, and in the second they cause real damage. Knowing which model you own isn't difficult. An orange rubber surround, bus-powered, designed to be tossed into a bag, is a Rugged. There is no mechanism in the Rugged SSD at all, so it fails the way flash storage fails rather than the way a disk would. Plain brushed aluminium, also bus-powered, is a Porsche Design mobile. If it came with its own mains adaptor, meaning the d2, the d2 Professional, the 2big and the 2big Dock, it sits in the desktop half of the range, and on those models a failed power supply can mimic a dead disk well enough to fool most owners, so it is worth testing before you get a quote and post anything. Then there is the one piece of information that dictates the entire job. Open up a LaCie and inside there is a Seagate or Toshiba mechanism identical to any other, the brand having been part of Seagate for years now. It comes out and is treated as a bare disk from that point forward: donor heads when the stack has failed, motor work when a bearing has gone, a matched board carrying its original ROM, and then a slow supervised copy. That is essentially the whole of LaCie data recovery once the shell is open, and it is why a job logged as repair LaCie external hard drive hardware becomes routine disk work within ten minutes of the screws coming off. Last but certainly not least: the bridge in most LaCie enclosures passes the disk through without encrypting anything at all. Secure models are the exception, as is any unit set up with LaCie's own encryption software, and nothing happens on either of those without the original credentials. There is a separate page on this site covering the Rugged, the Porsche Design, the d2 and the 2big families one at a time.
Take the mechanism out of a recent WD portable, put it on a SATA port, and you'll be looking at what seems to be gibberish. That is intended, and not some sort of malfunction. On those models the encryption is done by the small USB bridge inside the case, which leaves the bare disk carrying nothing that any computer can make sense of by itself. A noticeable share of the more worried calls the lab receives begin at exactly that moment, halfway through an experiment on somebody's kitchen table. On the bench this is completely routine. If the original bridge still works, it does the unscrambling. If it does not, a donor board together with a rebuilt key chain does the same job, and what comes back is your folder structure exactly as you left it, not a wall of static. Anyone searching external drive repair UK wide has one of three faults in front of them: the bridge, a board, or the mechanism. The free assessment identifies which, and a single external drive is £300 + VAT once that fault has been named.
An external is really a bare drive dressed up, so all the same tools and techniques of the drive workshop apply, with the bridge and encryption specialists standing behind them:
The firmware bench, and the reason a drive that reports nothing at all can still be read. Service mode, translator rebuilds, defect list maintenance and locked firmware areas brought back out. No downloadable software does any of this, nor does it claim to.
Sector-level timeouts and retry policy are set in hardware, the current draw is monitored from start to finish, and each head is copied individually. One difficult area of a disk then costs a few minutes of time rather than the rest of the disk.
Cases can be opened anywhere; drives cannot. A speck of household dust is several times taller than the gap a head flies in, so lids come off on the head-swap bench and only there.
Combs, jigs and lifters for moving a head stack, or a whole pack of platters, over into another chassis without a single recording surface being touched at any point along the way.
Racked by model, firmware family and factory code, because this business doesn't have "close enough" as a valid category. The difference between three days and three weeks typically comes down to whether or not the match is already on site.
Self-encrypting portable disks are imaged through their own interface board, if that board is still working. If the board has failed outright, the key chain is rebuilt, allowing the imaging to go ahead without relying on the broken board.
Interface boards are held here and matched by revision, so the encryption stays with the disk instead of leaving the building attached to the board that failed.
Expansions and Passports come in the largest numbers, with T7-class portable SSDs taking a slightly bigger share each quarter. Two points from that log are important enough to be said out loud. First, the WD encryption question. Because the crypto resides on the USB board, a failed bridge means the disk and its board have to travel together, and a caddy bought in hope is money thrown away. Second is thickness: most slim portables will tick after even the slightest knock, as there is very little clearance between the lid and the top platter. Discontinued badges are no obstacle either, as stripping a Freecom or an Iomega will reveal a mechanism our racks already cover. Regardless of what it says on the outside of the unit, an external hard drive is £300 + VAT and a portable SSD fits into the same band, naming the fault costs nothing, and finished work on a single drive takes 2 to 4 working days.
Nobody answers the phone at Iomega anymore. The brand went to EMC, then to Lenovo, and has now all but retired, yet the hardware keeps popping up across Berkshire: colourful eGo portables, silver desktop boxes which were used as the household archive for a decade, Home Media units that have been untouched since the router was swapped. What arrives is a sealed case, a barrel-plug power supply that has outlived its own manufacturer, and one copy of twenty years of photos. Inside you find a perfectly standard mechanism, made by Samsung or Seagate or WD depending on when it was built, from a generation we still have spare parts for. It images just like any other disk of that era. The difficult part is the housing, as these were engineered to snap together once and remain closed forever. If it does not come apart cleanly on your kitchen table, stop. Get a quote first, then post the entire unit as it is or drop it off at the Guildford lab, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, no appointment needed.
LaCie sells to people who move their work around, and travel is what eventually destroys the equipment. The Rugged that lives in a camera bag. The d2 that does the rounds between an edit suite and a client meeting. Motion and spinning platters are a bad mix, and a rubber bumper is worth a lot less than the peace of mind it gives you: set one down hard while the disk is still turning and the heads will pay for it. Desktop models tend to fail along a different line, usually losing the interface board while the mechanism behind it stays intact, which is the less expensive of the two outcomes by a wide margin. Seagate owns the name now, so there is no manufacturer to go back to and the work happens on a bench: shell off, a complete image of the bare disk, donor heads fitted only where the landing made that necessary, and the finished projects handed back from the copy rather than the original.
A My Passport is best thought of as one entirely self-contained unit. It does not have a separate USB adapter inside. The socket is part of the drive's own controller board, and the encryption runs on that same piece of silicon, so the data on the platters is ciphertext tied to one particular board. Lose the electronics and the files stay locked exactly where they are. So when you move the bare disk into a caddy, you get nothing but noise with sensible filenames on top of it, and that is why a fair number of Passports arrive here after a wasted weekend. We stock donor boards for the current generations on our shelves, and fitting one carries the key chain across unbroken, which is the entire job in just one step. My Book units, on the other hand, behave quite differently. They give out at the power stage first and the bridge second, usually around a mechanism that has done nothing wrong at all.
Small Buffalo and Transcend portables collect every injury on the list. They get dropped inside bags, the socket works loose, and bad sectors show up at times nobody planned for. Mains-powered DriveStation units routinely outlive their own power supply and interface board while the disk behind them carries on quite happily, which actually isn't as bad as it may sound, and it normally means a bridge repair rather than mechanical bench work. Several MiniStation models encrypt in hardware, and when the password is known that layer is opened as part of the recovery, so the returned data reads as ordinary files. If the password is not known, we tell you so before any money changes hands. All cases follow the same order: shell off, one complete sector-level image, and everything after that done to the image.
Nearly all of the jobs that we see arrive by parcel. Firstly you need to get a quote, either over the phone or with our free online diagnostic; once that has been done, sending the drive by tracked, insured post is one of the calmest ways to move a drive that may be struggling anyway, and most drives handed over in Berkshire, Surrey or London will arrive on the Guildford bench the very next working day.
Is the hard drive still bolted into a machine, whether that is a laptop, a tower, an iMac, a MacBook, a rack server or a DVR stored under the till? Get a quote first, then pull the drive out of the machine and send only the bare drive (never the entire machine): from a server the disks come out labelled by bay, and from a DVR you just send the disk. Stripping hardware is not something our lab does, though any repair shop on your high street can do it in about ten minutes. The one case with no way round it is memory chips soldered flat onto the mainboard, which is how T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and certain ultrabooks are built, and that storage is not taken on. Call us first if you're not sure which kind you have. Where the storage cannot be unbolted, there is no parcel to make up.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
With your quote in hand, the name on the parcel wants to be Guildford Data Recovery. Driving it over from Bracknell takes roughly forty minutes along the A322 followed by the A3, and you do not need an appointment; posting it costs you a stamp and a day. Either way, a message goes out to you as soon as the package has been logged onto our system, and two working days after that the diagnostic is finished.
Unsure which items should go in the box? Call 0800 689 0668 whilst the box is still open, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it guide you.
Why a shucked My Passport reads as static, and what to do instead
A dead bridge and a dropped disc look identical from outside
The beeping is a stalled motor, with a Seagate under the shell
Four faults get called dead, and one needs the head-swap bench
Caddy, cable and port ruled out before the disc is blamed
There is nothing to pay for the diagnosis, you get one written figure before any work begins, and the band on this page is £300 + VAT for any single hard drive or SSD, whether an older traditional drive or NVMe.