It is invariably the drive carrying the only copy that gets knocked onto the floor. Portable units and mains-powered ones, every brand there is, turn up here ticking, beeping, blinking or dead quiet, and they leave as readable files on fresh media. LaCie hardware makes up an unusually large share of this bench, and so do the cheap portables people order online, so if your desk holds one of those, read the sections below before trying anything further.
Anything sent in for external drive recovery is diagnosed free. The written figure that follows is settled before a screwdriver leaves the drawer: £300 + VAT for any single hard drive or SSD, NVMe included.
No fix, no fee covers logical recoveries. Outside it sit electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs, and physical work is 50% up front. Every band is published on the data recovery cost page.
Reading a symptom back to the failure underneath it is where the work genuinely starts, and this set of thirty accounts for all but a handful of the parcels that reach the Guildford bench. If yours is not on the list, it will still be recognised — describe it on the phone and you will get a straight answer about the odds before you post anything.
Almost every external splits into one of two cases, and the odds differ enormously between them. Case one is the bridge: the small board converting USB to SATA has failed, or its firmware has, while the disk behind it is in perfect health. That recovers, and it recovers well. Case two is mechanical, inside the enclosure, where the heads or the motor have gone. That is a clean-bench job with a real price and a real risk attached. Nothing on the outside of the case tells you which one you have, which is exactly what the free diagnostic is for.
The standard ending for a portable. Heads onto platters, then a repeating click as the drive tries to find its bearings and cannot. Every further power-up spends a little more of what is left, so trying it once more before posting it gains nothing at all.
Bridge, drive electronics or firmware, in roughly that order of likelihood, while the disk itself carries on turning with nothing left to speak for it. Two of those three are repairs measured in hours rather than days, which is why nobody should write one of these off from the outside.
Snatch the lead during a write and the file table tears, which is what produces that prompt on every machine afterwards. The files behind it have not moved anywhere. Decline, unplug, and stop connecting it to computers to see whether it has improved on its own.
That is the spindle motor trying and failing to turn a stack of heads which have stuck to the platters. Nothing inside an external is designed to make a noise like it. Unplug it, do not try it in a different port, and post it in as it stands.
A failed bridge and failed drive electronics look identical from a desk, and no amount of trying different ports separates them. Imaging runs through the original board where it can be persuaded to work and around it where it cannot, and which of those applies is settled in the first hour on the bench.
WD implements it in the bridge hardware rather than in software, so the platters carry ciphertext tied to one specific board. Take the bare disk out, connect it to anything else, and what you get is random data with a valid partition table sitting on top. The disk and its board have to stay together, and here they do.
Mains-powered enclosures nearly always give out at the power stage, and which component went decides whether this is the cheapest repair in the building or the most fiddly one. The mechanism inside is usually untouched. Establishing which of the two applies is what the diagnostic is for, and no figure is quoted before it.
Desktop externals take a specific voltage and polarity, and a similar-looking barrel plug from a drawer will destroy the board in a fraction of a second. The mechanism is usually untouched. The board needs rebuilding before anything can be read off the platters.
Spreading bad sectors turn a file copy into wading through mud. Imaging hardware moves faster than the decline does, but only just. Repeating the copy that failed yesterday feeds the decline and shortens whatever time is left.
These recover well on an external, on one condition: the drive is put away immediately and stays away. Everything done to it afterwards subtracts from the total, including the scan somebody runs to check whether the files are still there.
One blocked drain and a wet February send a handful of drives here every winter, and the Thames valley contributes its share of them. Platters survive water far better than owners assume. They are cleaned and stabilised, and where the motor will not turn at all the pack moves into a donor chassis under filtered air.
The thinnest 2.5-inch portables reply to almost any impact with clockwork ticking, and that follows directly from how little clearance sits between the lid and the top platter. Donor stacks for those families are kept within reach of the bench.
Rubber bumpers do more for confidence than they do for physics. Land one hard enough while the disk is turning and it becomes an ordinary head job wearing a very smart jacket. The case gets removed and the disk is treated like any other.
Years of nightly backups loosen the port until it only makes contact at certain angles, and then only if the lead is held. It gets reflowed, or bypassed altogether while the imaging runs off the bare disk.
A T7 or a SanDisk Extreme leaves electronically and never clicks, because there is nothing inside one capable of clicking. It is flash-bench work in an external drive's clothing, and the price follows the SSD band rather than the card band.
It works perfectly well for years, and then one morning the volume refuses to mount at all. Write caching and a snatched cable finally caught each other out. It gets put back together from one complete capture rather than repaired in place.
Freecom, Iomega and their contemporaries keep arriving with the family archive on board. The shell comes off and there is a thoroughly ordinary mechanism underneath, from a generation our racks have carried spares for since it was current. A dead brand is not the same thing as a dead disk, and it never has been.
Somebody caught the lead with a foot and the port came away with it, taking pads and tracks along. Those get rebuilt under magnification. Where the board is past helping, the bare disk comes out and is imaged directly on a bench adapter.
Shingled recording is now the norm in 2.5-inch externals, and a long transfer will fill the cache and then stop while the drive shuffles data into its overlapping tracks. It looks like a failure and frequently is not. Imaged at a rate the format will tolerate, most of them behave.
A portable asked to run continuously wears out years early, because continuous duty is not what any of them were built for. Drives designed for that exist, they cost very little more, and they are what a machine that never sleeps ought to be writing to.
An upright desktop unit that goes onto its side while writing can take head damage without ever leaving the desk it stands on. It is a short fall and a quick one, and the forces on a spinning platter do the rest. What follows is clean-bench work rather than anything electronic, and the desk carries no blame.
Some bargain portable SSDs are a cheap card behind a bridge chip inside a smart aluminium case. Whatever genuinely landed on the card comes back. The advertised capacity and the real one are two different numbers, and only one of them matters.
A long lead, or a hub running on bus power alone, leaves the drive short of current at precisely the wrong moment. It resets mid-write, nobody notices, and the same thing happens again the following week. Months of that leaves a file system full of half-finished transactions, and untangling it happens on a complete image.
The encryption in these enclosures is genuine, and that is exactly the problem. With the password the work is ordinary and the files come back as files. Without it there is no route in, and you will be told so on the first telephone call rather than after a fortnight of billable optimism.
Interrupted backups corrupt the bundle until the Mac refuses the whole thing as unusable. The band files are repaired first, and then the history is worked through for whichever versions somebody actually needs. Slower than a restore, and it returns a great deal more.
Recorders write in loops and lay their disks out in whatever scheme the manufacturer invented for that model, so nothing on one resembles a normal file system. The recordings are still present and get carved out of a raw image, worn sectors included. Recorder and DVR work is one of the stated exclusions from no fix, no fee.
Taking a cheap enclosure apart for the disk inside is a well-known way of buying a drive for less. What is not well known is that some bare disks then sit and do nothing in a PC, because the third pin on the SATA power connector carries a reset line that no enclosure ever used and some desktop supplies hold high. The drive looks completely dead and is in perfect health. A strip of tape over that pin, or an adapter that leaves it unconnected, and it spins straight up. Rule that out before assuming there is a fault at all.
Apple’s file systems mean nothing to Windows, so it reports the disk as empty and unformatted and offers to put that right. Accept, and an empty partition structure lands on top of a perfectly good one. Decline, and nothing whatever has been lost. Back on a Mac it mounts exactly as it did before.
Standalone duplicators copy from one bay to the other at a single button press, and nothing whatever stops that button being pressed with the disks in the wrong slots. A blank overwrites a full one at full speed. How much survives depends entirely on how far it had got before somebody looked at the lights.
Portable drives live in camera bags, laptop sleeves and the unzipped side pocket of a rucksack, and a good number of them finish up on a hard floor. Should the platter be turning at the moment of impact, the heads settle onto the surface, and the ticking that follows is the arm searching for a position it can no longer establish. That noise is more familiar 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 is revealed is a completely standard 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch mechanism, which means every technique used on the main drive bench applies without modification. The same holds for the cheap portables sold by the pallet online, where UnionSine is the name that appears most often on booking sheets. A UnionSine external hard drive not working is very rarely anything unusual. There is a conventional laptop mechanism inside, joined 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 in the way WD portables do, which makes them an easier proposition than the price would lead you to expect. So a UnionSine hard drive not working after a knock receives the identical treatment a Seagate or a Toshiba would: shell off, onto the imaging hardware, read slowly, and £300 + VAT for the drive regardless of the badge on the front. Photographers working around Ascot, Henley and Windsor keep entire back catalogues on units of exactly this sort, and each one arriving here is handled as though that is what it contains.
The LaCie name accounts for a big enough share of the traffic reaching this page to justify a section on its own, and no other brand has its symptoms misread as often. Take the noise first. A LaCie hard drive beeping is not the sound of a drive dying. It is the spindle motor attempting to reach speed, failing, and trying again about once every second. Two causes between them explain nearly all of it. The first is power. Bus-powered 2.5-inch units, which includes the Rugged line and the brushed aluminium Porsche Design mobile drives, take everything they need through the USB port, so a frayed lead, an unpowered hub, or a laptop port already feeding three other things will leave the motor a little short of the current it has to have. The second is mechanical: a spindle bearing that will no longer turn freely, or a head stack parked down on the platter and stuck fast. Swapping the cable helps neither of them. Repeated attempts only waste time in the first case and do genuine harm in the second. Working out which model you own is not difficult. Orange rubber surround, bus-powered, designed to be thrown into a bag, that is a Rugged. The Rugged SSD contains no mechanism whatsoever and fails the way flash storage fails rather than the way a disk does. Plain brushed aluminium, bus-powered again, that is a Porsche Design mobile. Anything supplied with its own mains adaptor, meaning the d2, the d2 Professional, the 2big and the 2big Dock, sits in the desktop half of the range, and on those a failed power supply mimics a failed drive convincingly enough to catch most owners out, so it is worth testing before you post anything. Then there is the fact that determines the entire job. Undo the shell of a LaCie and what you find is a Seagate or Toshiba mechanism the same as 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 on: donor heads where the stack has failed, motor work where a bearing has gone, a matched board carrying its original ROM, and then a slow supervised copy. That is the whole of LaCie data recovery once the case is open, and it is why a job logged as repair LaCie external hard drive hardware turns into routine disk work within ten minutes of the screws coming out. One more useful fact: the bridge fitted to 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 without the original credentials. A separate page on this site covers the Rugged, the Porsche Design, the d2 and the 2big families one at a time.
Pull the mechanism out of a WD portable of recent manufacture, put it on a SATA port, and what appears is apparent gibberish. That behaviour is intended, not a symptom. On those models the encryption is performed by the small USB bridge inside the case, which leaves the bare disk carrying nothing a computer can make sense of by itself. A noticeable share of the more worried calls this office takes begin at precisely that moment, halfway through an experiment on somebody's kitchen table. On the bench it is entirely routine. If the original bridge still functions it performs the unscrambling. If it does not, a donor board together with a rebuilt key chain does the job instead, and what comes back is your folder structure exactly as you left it rather than a wall of noise. Anyone searching external drive repair UK wide has one of three faults in front of them: a bridge, a board, or a mechanism. The free assessment establishes which, and a single external drive is £300 + VAT once that fault has a name.
An external is a bare drive in fancy dress, so the whole drive workshop applies, with the bridge and encryption specialists standing behind it:
The firmware bench, and the reason a drive reporting nothing at all can still be read. Service mode, translator rebuilds, defect table maintenance and locked firmware areas pulled back out. Downloadable software does none of this and never claims to.
Sector-level timeouts and retry policy set in hardware, with the current draw watched from beginning to end and each head copied separately. A stubborn region then costs a few minutes instead of costing the rest of the disk.
Cases can be opened anywhere. Drives cannot. A particle of household dust stands several times taller than the gap a head flies in, so lids come off under filtered air and nowhere else at all.
Combs, jigs and lifters for moving a head stack, or a complete pack of platters, into another chassis without a single recording surface being touched at any point.
Racked by model, firmware family and factory code, because close enough is not a category that exists in this trade. Having the match already on site is usually the difference between three days and three weeks.
Self-encrypting portables are imaged through their own interface board wherever that board still works. Where it has failed outright, the key chain is reconstructed so the imaging can proceed without it.
Interface boards held here and matched by revision, so the encryption travels with the disk instead of leaving the building attached to the board that failed.
Expansions and Passports arrive in the largest numbers, with T7-class portable SSDs taking a slightly bigger share every quarter. Two things in that log are worth saying out loud. The first is the WD encryption question. Because the crypto sits 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. The second is thickness: a slim portable will tick after almost any knock, simply because so little clearance sits between the lid and the top platter. Discontinued badges are no obstacle either, since stripping a Freecom or an Iomega reveals a mechanism our racks already cover. Whatever name is printed on the case, an external hard drive is £300 + VAT and a portable SSD sits in the same band, naming the fault costs nothing, and finished single-drive work runs 2 to 4 working days.
Nobody answers the telephone at Iomega any more. The brand went to EMC, then to Lenovo, and was quietly shelved, yet the hardware keeps surfacing across Berkshire: coloured eGo portables, silver desktop boxes that served as the household archive for a decade, Home Media units nobody has touched since the router was changed. What turns up is a sealed case, a barrel-plug power supply that has outlived its own manufacturer, and one copy of twenty years of photographs. Inside the shell is a perfectly ordinary mechanism, Samsung or Seagate or WD depending on the year it was built, from a generation we still hold spares for. It images like any other disk of that age. The genuinely awkward part is the case itself, because these were designed to clip together once and never be opened again. If it will not separate cleanly on a kitchen table, stop and post the whole unit as it stands.
LaCie sells to people whose work travels, and travelling is what eventually breaks the equipment. The Rugged that lives in a camera bag. The d2 carried between an edit suite and a client meeting. Movement and spinning platters make a poor combination, and a rubber bumper is worth considerably less than the confidence it inspires: set one down hard while the disk is still turning and the heads pay for it. Desktop models fail along a different line, usually losing the interface board while the mechanism behind it stays in fine order, which is the cheaper of the two outcomes by a wide margin. Seagate owns the name now, so there is no manufacturer route to fall back on and the work happens on a bench: shell off, 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 understood as one sealed instrument. There is no separate USB adapter inside it. The socket is part of the drive’s own controller board and the encryption engine runs on that same piece of silicon, so the platters hold ciphertext tied to one particular board. Lose the electronics and the files stay locked exactly where they lie. That is why moving the bare disk into a caddy returns nothing but noise with sensible filenames on top of it, and why a fair number of Passports arrive here after a wasted weekend. Donor boards for the current generations are stocked on our shelves, and fitting one carries the key chain across unbroken, which is the whole job in a single step. My Book units behave quite differently. They give out at the power stage first and the bridge second, generally 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 appear on a schedule nobody planned. Mains-powered DriveStation boxes routinely outlive their own power supply and interface board while the disk behind carries on quite happily, which sounds worse than it is and normally means a bridge repair rather than clean-bench work. Several MiniStation variants encrypt in hardware, and where the password is known that layer is opened as part of the job so what comes back reads as ordinary files. Where it is not known, we say so before any money changes hands. The order of work does not vary: shell off, one complete sector-level image, and everything afterwards done to that image.
Nearly every job here arrived as a parcel. Tracked, insured post is the calmest way to move a drive that is already struggling, and something handed over in Berkshire, Surrey or London 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.
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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.
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 clean bench
Caddy, cable and port ruled out before the disc is blamed
Nothing to pay for the diagnosis, one written figure before any work begins, and the band on this page is £300 + VAT for any single hard drive or SSD, NVMe included.