Hardly anybody searching for hard drive repair wants a repaired hard drive. They want the photographs, the accounts, the dissertation. Those are two different jobs and only one of them is worth paying for, so this page covers what really gets fixed on a bench, why it is a means to a copy rather than a cure, and which repair tools quietly make the situation worse.
Whatever is wrong with it, a single disk is £300 + VAT. Spinning or solid state, NVMe included, with the diagnostic behind that figure costing nothing. Work on damaged mechanics or electronics takes half upfront and falls outside the no fix, no fee guarantee.
Parts are replaced on this bench and firmware is rebuilt, but none of it is done to give you a working disk back. Every repair below exists for one reason: to hold a failing drive together long enough to copy what is on it.
Clicking and beeping usually mean the read heads can no longer find their bearings. A matched donor stack goes in under filtered air, the drive is asked for one careful pass, and it is retired the moment that pass finishes. Mechanical work, so 50% of the quoted figure is due upfront.
A surge or the wrong power supply takes out the protection components on the controller board, and sometimes more. A donor board on its own is rarely enough, because the drive keeps its calibration data in a chip on the original. That has to be moved across. Board and chip level work sits outside no fix, no fee.
Every drive keeps its own housekeeping in a reserved area you never see: the translator that maps addresses to physical locations, the defect lists, the tuning tables. Corrupt any of it and a perfectly healthy set of platters becomes a drive that reports zero capacity. Firmware repair is covered by no fix, no fee.
A drive that hums and never spins up has usually parked its heads on the surface or jammed its spindle. Freeing that is delicate and occasionally means moving the platters to a donor chassis, which is the highest risk operation on the bench and is quoted as such before anybody touches it.
Weak sectors that take several seconds each, and grow in number every hour the drive is powered. The repair here is a change of tactics rather than parts: reads split by head, timeouts cut short, the bad regions skipped and revisited at the end so the healthy 98% is banked first.
A good share of drives sent in for repair are mechanically fine. Deleted files, a damaged file table, a partition that vanished, a volume that mounts as RAW. Those never need opening, they are worked on a copy, and they run under no fix, no fee.
This is the part that surprises people, so it is worth saying early. A disk that has had its heads replaced has been opened, fitted with parts from another unit and aligned to tolerances measured in fractions of a hair. It works because it is being nursed, on a bench, for a few hours. It is a patient on a table, not a refurbished appliance, and putting it back in a laptop would be reckless. The same goes for a drive whose firmware has been rebuilt by hand.
So the thing you are buying is not a working drive. It is a copy of your data, delivered on separate media, and a failed disk that stops being storage the moment it fails. Once you see it that way, most of the choices get simpler. There is no point paying to make a fifteen year old disk healthy again. There is every point in getting the contents off it, once, cleanly, before the next attempt makes that harder.
Some mean the work above. Many mean they will plug the drive in and run software at it. That distinction matters enormously, because repair utilities are written on the assumption that the hardware underneath is fine and only the file system has gone astray. Point one at a drive with failing heads or a spreading defect list and it will issue tens of thousands of reads across the exact surfaces that are struggling, for hours, and write its conclusions back onto the disk you were hoping to copy.
The tell is simple enough. Ask whether the drive will be imaged before anything else happens, and whether anything will be written to the original at any stage. If the answer is vague, the drive is being experimented on.
CHKDSK does not repair drives. It repairs file systems, and it does that by making the structure internally consistent, which is not the same as making it correct. Faced with a directory it cannot resolve it will delete entries, truncate files and dump loose fragments into a found folder, then write all of that back. On a disk with unstable reads it can grind for hours and finish having discarded the very records that made your data findable. Run once on a healthy disk with a small inconsistency, it is useful. Run on a dying one, it is the last thing that happens before a much harder job.
The same applies to the format prompt Windows raises when it cannot read a volume, to defragmenting, to any tool that offers to fix bad sectors by writing to them, and to the habit of powering a clicking drive on again to see whether it sounds better today. It never sounds better. Each spin-up drags heads across surfaces they are already damaging, and the recoverable share drops with every attempt.
Work opens with an assessment that writes nothing: how the drive identifies itself, what its own health counters say, how long it takes to answer, whether it can hold a stable link at all. If a physical fault is found the drive goes to the clean bench and the repairs described above happen. Only then does imaging start, and it starts on hardware built for disks that fail mid-sentence rather than on an ordinary computer.
The image is taken in an order chosen to bank the easy material first, because a failing drive has a budget of working hours and nobody knows the size of it. Everything after that, the file system rebuild, the partition work, the sorting into folders you recognise, happens against the copy. Your drive sits on a shelf untouched, which means a second attempt is always possible if the first pass leaves something behind.
Prices here are banded rather than negotiated, and the band follows what the storage is rather than how badly it has failed. A lone hard drive or SSD, NVMe included, sits at £300 + VAT. Flash media is £250 + VAT, which covers memory cards and USB pen drives. Anything holding more than one disk, whether that is a NAS in a cupboard or a rack unit in a server room, opens at £500 + VAT because every member earns an image of its own. Recorders out of CCTV systems are £400 + VAT. Forensic jobs are £800 + VAT where a written report is needed and £400 + VAT where it is not. The diagnostic that produces your figure costs nothing, closes two working days after the drive lands and never faster, and the price is fixed in writing before anybody is authorised to start.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Read practically, that means a logical fault carries the guarantee outright, while damaged electronics, damaged mechanics, water and fire all sit outside it and take half the quoted figure before the drive is opened. Firmware repair is inside the guarantee. Board repair is not. The line falls in the same place for every customer, and it is on the quotation you read before you agree to anything.
Most people arrive having run something that reported the drive as healthy, or as failing, and want to know what weight to put on it. Modest weight. The counters worth reading are the reallocated sector count, which records surfaces the drive has already given up on and quietly replaced, and the pending sector count, which records places it could not read cleanly and has not yet decided about. A pending count that climbs over a few days is a drive actively deteriorating, and it is the clearest warning you will get.
What those counters cannot do is see a fault outside their own accounting. A drive with a failing head assembly, a corrupt translator or a preamp on the way out will happily report itself as being in good order right up to the moment it stops answering, because nothing in its self-assessment covers that. So a clean bill of health from a monitoring tool on a drive that is clicking, stalling or vanishing from the machine means only that the drive has not noticed. Trust the noise and the behaviour over the summary, every time.
There is no counter in Bracknell, so nothing is done while you wait in the Lexicon car park. What there is instead is a bench about 40 minutes away, down the A322 and onto the A3, at the Guildford Business Park. Drive it over if you would rather hand it to a person at reception, or post it and let the tracking do the worrying. Drives arrive here from the offices off the A329M, from Wokingham and Reading, from Windsor and Ascot, and from commuters who work in London and only discovered the problem at the weekend. The postcode makes no difference to the price or to the queue.
One local habit worth breaking: taking a struggling drive to a computer shop to have a look at first. A look means a power-on, sometimes several, occasionally with recovery software attached. On a logical fault that is survivable. On a mechanical one it decides how much of the disk still reads by the time it gets here, and it is the single most common reason a job arrives already half spent.
Leave it switched off, post it in, and the repairs happen only as far as they need to for a clean image.
Post is how almost every job here starts. A tracked, insured parcel is far gentler on a struggling drive than a car boot and a day of errands, and something handed to Royal Mail in Bracknell today is normally booked in at the Guildford bench tomorrow.
If the storage is still bolted into a laptop, a tower, an iMac, a server or a CCTV box, unbolt it. The bare drive is what the bench needs, and no machines are dismantled at this end. Any repair shop will pull one out in a few minutes if you would rather not. The exception, and it is a hard one, is storage soldered directly to the logic board — Apple Silicon Macs, a few very thin Windows laptops, most tablets. If it does not come out, there is nothing that can be posted.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Write Guildford Data Recovery on the label. Driving it down from Bracknell is roughly 40 minutes on the A322 and the A3; posting it costs you an envelope and a day. Either way you get a call once it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes two working days later.
Not sure what should go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it ask the questions.