The rule holds on every desk in York: the drive carrying the only copy is the one that slips off it. Clicking, beeping, flashing or silent, portables and mains-powered externals of every badge reach this bench — an external hard drive recovery service that spends most of its week on exactly this — and go home as readable files on new media.
Every external drive job is diagnosed free. The quote turns up fixed, in writing, before a screwdriver is lifted.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
First job on any external drive is putting the symptoms against the fault — after twenty-odd years, these twenty-five account for nearly everything that comes through the door.
The portable drive's signature exit: heads into platters, and each further power-up wagers what remains. Stop wagering. Post it.
Bridge, board or firmware down while the disk inside stays alive with no interpreter. A staffing problem, and we staff it.
Cables yanked mid-write shred file tables and prompt that dialog. The files behind the prompt are fine; the offer deserves refusal.
A spindle straining against stuck heads, announced in morse. Unplug, resist attempt number two, send it over.
Bridge failure or dead electronics. We image through the original board where possible and around it where necessary.
WD builds the cipher into the USB board itself. A hopeful caddy swap therefore shows static, not folders — the chain must transfer whole, and here it does.
Mains-powered desktops die at the power stage — occasionally the cheapest repair on the premises, occasionally the fiddliest. The diagnostic tells us which.
Marching bad sectors turn copies into treacle. Imaging hardware outpaces the decline; repeated hopeful copying feeds it.
Deletions and formats on externals recover well — strictly provided the drive is parked at once and stays parked.
Flooded cellars along the rivers deliver us drives most winters. Platters withstand more than owners dare hope: cleaned, stabilised, transplanted under the hood.
Seagate's STEA and STKM portables answer knocks with clockwork clicking. Their donor stacks live within arm's reach.
LaCie's orange armour flatters morale more than physics; one landing too many and it's a standard head job in a fancy jacket.
Toshiba's micro-B port loosens after years of nightly duty. Reflowed — or bypassed entirely while the imaging runs.
T7s and SanDisk Extremes exit electronically, without so much as a click. Flash-rig cases dressed in an external's shell.
Yank-it-out endings accumulate until one day the volume won't mount at all. Reassembled from a complete capture.
Iomega, Freecom and friends resurface bearing the family archive. Inside sit ordinary mechanisms our donor racks covered years ago.
Somebody tripped the cable and took the port with it. Pads rebuilt under the scope, or the bare drive imaged directly.
The SMR 2.5-inch drives inside many newer externals stall and drop off mid-copy. Imaged at a pace shingle media tolerates.
A portable pressed into 24/7 duty wears out years early. Continuous operation is what NAS drives are for — this wasn't that.
Upright desktop units knocked flat mid-write collect head damage without leaving the desk. Hood work follows the tumble.
Bargain 'portable SSDs' sometimes hide one cheap card behind a bridge chip. We recover what truly landed on the card; the casing goes to landfill.
Bus power through an unpowered hub or long lead browns the drive out mid-write, again and again. Cumulative damage, cured from a complete image.
That encryption is genuine, which is precisely the difficulty. Password in hand: routine. Password gone: we say so straight instead of retailing hope.
Interrupted Time Machine runs corrupt the bundle until restores refuse outright. We mend the band files and mine the history for what actually matters.
PVR boxes loop their disks like CCTV and format them eccentrically. The programmes carve from a raw image, tired sectors notwithstanding.
Portable drives ride in camera bags around the Shambles, commute the A64 in laptop sleeves, and perch on desk edges until gravity has its say. When a spinning mechanism meets a hard floor, the heads take the landing — hence the click that follows a drop, the most familiar sound in this building. Seagate Expansion and One Touch, WD Passport and Elements, Toshiba Canvio, Buffalo MiniStation, LaCie Rugged: each is an ordinary drive in fancy dress, and the whole of the drive bench is available to all of them. Photographers working York's wedding and tourism trade keep entire livelihoods on these things — we treat every one as though that's what it is.
Take the disk out of a modern WD portable and wire it to plain SATA and what greets you is static — by design, because the USB interface board is a link in the drive's hardware encryption. A good share of the panicked calls we field start at exactly that moment, mid-DIY. On this bench it's unremarkable: the original bridge does the decrypting where it still can, a donor board and a rebuilt cipher chain stand in where it can't, and the folder tree returns exactly as you left it.
Every external is a bare drive in costume, so the full drive workshop applies — with the bridge specialists in support:
The firmware rig a lab either owns or pretends it doesn't need. Factory service mode opens up, translators get rebuilt, defect tables mended, locked firmware zones read out. Consumer software cannot begin any of that.
Failing mechanisms are cloned one head at a time while the current draw is watched. Timeouts per sector, retries decided in hardware. A software imager hopes for the best; these plan for the worst.
No lid comes off outside the filtered hood. Room dust on a platter shortens its life, so the two are never introduced.
Jigs, combs and lifters for shifting head stacks and complete platter packs between chassis. No surface ever touches another — a rule with no small print.
Donor racks sorted by model, firmware family and factory code. Nine times out of ten the matching head stack is already in the building rather than on a courier.
Self-encrypting portables, WD's above all, image through their original bridge — or the cipher chain is reconstructed so imaging can proceed without it.
Interface boards from our own shelves, matched so a drive's encryption rides through the swap untouched.
Counting raw arrivals, Expansions and Passports lead this building's league table, with T7-class solid state climbing every quarter. Two standing notes from the log: WD keeps its encryption on the USB board, so a dead bridge means carrying the cipher chain across rather than trying caddies; and Seagate's slimmest portables meet every knock with clicking. The drawer-found Iomegas and Freecoms undress into ordinary mechanisms already on our donor racks — orphan badge, routine job.
Nobody at Iomega will pick up — the marque passed through EMC, then Lenovo, then into silence — yet its externals keep emerging from York's drawers: eGo portables in cheerful colours, desktop units that served a decade as the family vault, Home Media boxes untouched since the children left home. Orphaned and unrecoverable are different words. Beneath the branding sits a common Samsung, Seagate or WD mechanism our donor racks stocked long ago, so an Iomega takes the same imaging path as last week's purchase. Case won't yield? Send it whole — persuading stubborn legacy enclosures open without harm is part of the trade.
LaCie built for people in motion — Ruggeds living in camera bags, d2 desktops beneath edit suites — and motion is what retires them. Set a Rugged down hard mid-spin and the heads go regardless of orange rubber; the desktop ranges more often lose their Thunderbolt or USB-C boards while the disk behind stays sound. With the marque folded into Seagate there's no factory route left, so the way home runs through a workshop: enclosure opened, bare disk imaged, donor heads fitted where the landing insists, projects returned off the copy.
Think of a My Passport as one sealed instrument: USB socket mounted straight onto the drive's controller board, hardware encryption living in the same silicon. Kill the electronics and the files stay locked in place — and a hopeful swap into a spare caddy serves up static wearing filenames. This workshop keeps donor boards for the WDBPKJ and WDBYVG generations and moves the cipher chain over intact, which is the whole difference between a Passport that stays 'undetected' and one that mounts by the weekend. My Books fail in their own way — brick first, bridge second — around a mechanism in fine health.
MiniStations pick up the usual 2.5-inch injuries — drops, sockets worked loose, sector rot on its own schedule — while DriveStation desktops generally outlast their power supplies and interface boards. A number of MiniStation variants encrypt in hardware; supply the password and that layer opens during recovery, so what returns reads as ordinary files. Whatever the model, the running order holds: shell away, full sector image, then standard recovery conducted entirely on the copy.
Nearly every job on our bench arrived by tracked, insured post — it's the quickest, safest route in. There's no collection service, so the parcel is yours to send or hand in.
Is the drive still inside a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Take the hard drive or SSD out first and post the bare drive on its own — removing drives from machines isn't a service we offer. Storage that's soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, certain slim laptops) is the one thing we can't work on: if it doesn't come out, it can't come in.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Address the parcel for the attention of Leeds Data Recovery — about 40 minutes from York via the A64 and A1(M), or next working day by tracked post. You'll hear from us the moment it's booked onto the bench.
Not certain what to pack? Ring 0800 689 0668 first, or run the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, a fixed written figure, no fix no fee on most work — start online or ring the freephone.