This rule applies to every desk in York: the drive carrying the only copy is the one that slips off it. Clicking, beeping, flashing or silent, portable hard drives and mains-powered external hard drives of every brand come to this bench, an external hard drive recovery service where most of our week is spent on just this, and leave here as readable files on new media.
Each external drive job is diagnosed for free. The quote comes back to you fixed, in writing, before a tool is lifted.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Chip level, electronic and mechanical repair is charged at 50% at start-up, and the other 50% only upon successful recovery of your data; all BitLocker, ransomware, forensic and CCTV/DVR recoveries are charged at start-up when you accept our fixed quote. More information can be found on the data recovery cost page.
We match the symptoms against the fault as the first job on any external hard drive. After twenty years of doing this, these twenty-five account for almost everything that comes through our door.
The portable drive's signature exit: heads into platters, and each time you turn it back on you're wagering what remains. Don't wager. Get a quote first on 0800 689 0668 or with our free online diagnostic tool, then post it.
Board, bridge or firmware is down while the disk inside is still alive with no interpreter. That is a staffing problem, and we staff it.
If you pull the cable out mid-write, the file tables get shredded and that dialog prompt appears. The files behind the prompt are usually intact, so decline the offer.
The spindle is straining against jammed heads, announced in Morse code. Turn it off, do not try again, call us on 0800 689 0668 for your quote, then send it to us.
Dead bridge (or dead electronics). We image through the original board as much as possible, and go around it when needed.
The cipher is built into WD's own USB board. Therefore if you perform a caddy swap you will see static instead of folders. The whole chain needs to be transferred over, and here that is what happens.
Mains-powered desktop drives fail at the power stage. Sometimes this is the cheapest fix we do. Sometimes it requires a lot of fiddling. Our diagnostic tells us which.
Bad sectors marching in will turn copies into goo. Imaging hardware is able to keep up with the deterioration; repeatedly attempting to copy in hope only feeds it.
Data recovery from external drives (after deletions and formatting) works reasonably well, as long as the drive is powered off immediately and remains powered off.
Every winter, flooded river cellars deliver us damaged hard drives. Platters are far tougher than their owners dare hope: they are cleaned, stabilised, then transplanted on the head-swap bench.
Seagate's STEA and STKM portable drives respond to knocks with clockwork clicking. Donor parts for these drives are always close enough to reach by hand.
LaCie's bright orange armour may boost your mood, but it does little against physics. One fall too many is enough to need a standard head replacement under LaCie's attractive outer casing.
The Toshiba micro-B port comes loose after years of being plugged in and run nightly. It gets reflowed, or bypassed altogether while the imaging runs.
The T7 and SanDisk Extreme fail electronically, without a single click. They are flash cases dressed in an external drive's shell.
Eventually, after enough times you pull out the connector, there will come a day when the volume won't mount at all. We reassemble it from a complete capture.
Old Iomegas and Freecoms, etc., pop up with the family archives on them. Inside each are ordinary mechanisms our donor racks covered years ago.
Someone tripped on the cable and pulled the port out with it. Pads are rebuilt under the microscope, or the bare drive is imaged directly.
Newer external hard drives (with SMR 2.5-inch drives inside) often stall and drop off mid-copy. The drives are imaged at a pace the shingled media can tolerate.
A portable that was used continuously wears out years before its time. That's what NAS drives are meant for, and this wasn't one.
When upright desktop units are knocked onto their sides during a write, the heads can be damaged without the drive ever leaving the desk. Head-swap bench work follows the fall.
Many bargain "portable SSDs" are one low-cost card behind a bridge chip, calling themselves an SSD. What actually landed on the card we can recover. The enclosure hardly matters.
If you're using bus power through an unpowered hub or a long lead, your drive will brown out in the middle of a write, and this can keep happening multiple times. The damage accumulates, and we put it right from a full image.
That encryption is genuine, which is exactly our problem. So, password in hand: routine. Password gone: we tell you plainly rather than selling hope.
An interrupted Time Machine run corrupts the bundle until restores are refused flat out. We fix the band files and dig through the history for what truly matters.
PVR boxes loop their disks like CCTV and format them oddly. The programmes are carved from a raw disk image, regardless of the tired sectors.
You see portable drives carried by photographers in their camera bags along The Shambles. They also travel the A64 in laptop sleeves to and from work, and many sit at the edge of desks where they can fall onto a hard surface. When that happens, the heads take the landing (which is why you hear a "click" after a portable drive falls), probably the most common sound heard in our building. Seagate Expansion and One Touch, WD Passport and Elements, Toshiba Canvio, Buffalo MiniStation, LaCie Rugged: they come in a variety of outfits, but each is an ordinary drive inside, and the whole of the drive bench is available to all of them. Most of the photographers who shoot weddings and tourists in York store their entire livelihood on drives like these, so we treat every one as if it contains exactly that.
You take a WD portable's disk out and connect it to a plain SATA port, and what you see is static, by design (because the USB interface board is part of the hardware encryption). Many of the frantic calls we receive come from people who have reached exactly this point in their DIY attempt. On this bench there is nothing unusual about it: the original bridge does the decrypting where possible; a donor board and a rebuilt cipher chain are used wherever the original can't; and your folder tree returns exactly as you last saw it.
Every portable is merely a drive wearing a costume. So all of the procedures of a full drive workshop apply, with assistance from our bridge experts:
The firmware rig a lab either owns or pretends it doesn't need. Factory service mode gives access, translators are rebuilt, defect tables fixed and locked firmware regions read out. No consumer software can begin any of those processes.
Each failing mechanism is cloned head by head while the current draw is monitored. Timeouts are set per sector and retry decisions are made entirely in hardware. A software imaging tool hopes everything will go well; these tools are designed for failure.
The only time a cover comes off any device is on our head-swap bench, and a platter is never handled on an open desk.
Jigs, combs and lifters allow head stacks and complete platter packs to be moved between chassis. Surfaces never touch each other, and we're serious about that.
Donor racks are sorted by model number, firmware family and factory code. Nine times out of ten the matching head stack is already in our inventory, rather than on a courier.
Self-encrypting portable drives (WD's above all) can be imaged through the bridge they originally came with, or if needed the cipher chain is recreated so imaging can go ahead without it.
Interface boards taken off our own shelves, matched to the drive so its encryption rides through the swap untouched.
As far as total units arriving here go, Expansions and Passports top the list, and T7-class solid state continues to climb each quarter. Two items to note from the log: WD places the encryption on the USB board, so if the bridge dies the cipher chain has to be carried across instead of trying a caddy; and Seagate's thinnest portables click with every knock. The drawer-found Iomegas and Freecoms come apart into ordinary mechanisms already on our donor racks: orphaned badge, routine repair.
No one at Iomega answers: the brand went through EMC, then Lenovo and now complete silence. Yet Iomega externals continue to emerge from York's drawers: colourful eGo portables, desk models with ten years' use as the family "vault", Home Media boxes untouched since the children moved out. Being orphaned and being unrecoverable are two very different things. Underneath the branding lies a common Samsung, Seagate or WD mechanism that our donor racks stocked long ago, so an Iomega takes the exact same imaging path as this week's purchase. Won't open? First get your quote, then post it as it is; coaxing stubborn old cases open without damaging them is part of the trade.
LaCie was made for people on the move: Ruggeds carried in camera bags, d2 desktops sitting under edit suites, and that movement is what eventually retires them. A Rugged set down hard mid-spin can still damage the heads, whatever the colour of the rubber; by contrast, the desktop drives are more likely to lose their Thunderbolt or USB-C board than suffer damage to the disk itself. Since LaCie has been folded into Seagate there's no factory route left, so the way home runs through a workshop: the case is opened, the disk inside imaged, donor heads fitted where the landing insists, and project files returned from the copy.
My Passport has everything built in as a single unit. The USB connection sits on the main controller board along with the hardware encryption. Therefore if the board dies, your data stays locked, and even moving the disk into a spare caddy will only show noise with file names attached. Donor boards for both the WDBPKJ and WDBYVG families are always kept here. We transfer the entire cipher chain over intact from one board to the other (this is the whole difference between a Passport that stays "undetected" and one that mounts by the weekend). My Book drives fail differently: typically bricking first and losing the bridge second, while the mechanism stays in good condition.
MiniStation drives are subject to the common problems of 2.5 inch drives (drops, sockets coming loose over time, sectors failing at their own whim). Desktop DriveStation models generally last longer than either the power supply or interface board they connect to. Some MiniStation models use a hardware-based form of encryption. Once you give us the password, that encryption is removed during recovery, so your files will come back in their unencrypted state. The process remains identical whatever the model: remove the outer case, create an exact sector-by-sector image of the entire disk, then perform standard file recovery from the image.
Before you send anything, we need to get a quote to you. You can get one either by phoning us (0800 689 0668) or by completing our free online diagnostic tool. Once you have your quote, the majority of drives are sent to us by tracked & insured post, as this is the fastest and safest way of getting your drive to our lab in Leeds. As we do not offer a collection service, it's up to you to post it to us. Alternatively, if you wish, you may drop it off at our Leeds laboratory's reception.
Does the hard drive or SSD remain within a piece of equipment such as a laptop, MacBook, iMac, DVR/CCTV unit or server? Before posting the drive to us, take the hard drive or SSD out of the device and send just that drive. We do not perform a service for removing storage from other equipment. For servers and RAID units, please send all drives. Label each drive so that we know which drive comes from what bay. For a NAS unit, if possible, take out the individual drives, label each with the bay it belongs to and post them. If this isn't possible, simply send the entire NAS unit to us. Regrettably, we are unable to work on storage soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, T2 Macs and several ultra-thin laptops); if it can't be removed from the board, it can't be sent in to us. Please contact us before posting if you're unsure whether your storage can be removed.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Once you have your quote, send your package addressed to Leeds Data Recovery (about a 40 minute drive from York on the A64 & A1(M) or next working day if you want to send it using trackable post). We will contact you as soon as we have taken delivery of your package and put it in line to be worked upon.
Having trouble deciding how best to pack your item? Get in touch with us first by calling our helpline on 0800 689 0668 or use our complimentary online diagnostic tool.
You will receive a free diagnosis, then a fixed written quote, and on most work you will only pay if your data is recovered. You can start this process online or by calling our freephone.