The majority of failed hard drives arrive here with a similar story: it made a couple of clicks, then was gone from your computer, someone gave it one last try just to make sure. We have been told all versions and have recovered most. York Data Recovery offers a hard drive recovery service for both domestic and commercial clients in the area from Acomb to the Minster quarter. The diagnosis costs nothing, and the price that you agree upon will be fixed in writing prior to opening the drive.
Each hard drive is diagnosed at no charge. Your approved quote will be fixed in writing before we use a screwdriver.
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.
The first step when working on any hard drive is to put the problem (symptoms) against the cause of the problem (fault). After 20-odd years, these 25 account for almost every single thing that comes into the lab.
Heads sweeping for servo marks they can no longer find. Head failure announcing itself, and each retry takes its toll on the platter surface.
Drive motor seizure, heads parked on the platter where they should not be parked, or spiky electronics. One silence, three suspects; the rig separates them.
There's power going in but no name is being assigned. This indicates a controller board or firmware has taken a sulk: it can usually be recovered (but never over a USB connection).
No speaker on board: that beep is the spindle straining against jammed heads or a locked bearing. Retries wind it tighter, so stop retrying.
A surface of the drive is deteriorating and causing Explorer to freeze and choke copies. If you leave it running, it will continue to compound every hour, therefore don't let it run for hours.
The drive's internal address mapping has failed, so the drive says "busy" or reports that it contains 0GB. The best-known Seagate fault, fixed through the service terminal.
The head and platter collided at speed, and the outcome was decided in milliseconds. No amount of power cycling will allow the drive to re-negotiate anything.
Lightning season is peak time for us, and bargain priced power supplies (PSUs) seem to be cooking their drives' electronics. We carry out board level repair with the original ROM carried over as an ongoing service.
In general, most of your data will survive a quick format; however, the key item is if anything was written after that. If you can get away with writing nothing then do so.
When bookkeeping goes, your library remains intact. The partition table will be rebuilt, unless someone says yes to the format prompt, which is the one way to lose everything.
The 3TB Seagate model that has been responsible for many head stack failures continues to limp into our racks each month. Its donors have never left our shelves.
A sustained write operation backs up the shingled ST2000DM008 until it appears dead. Most times, it is simply queuing. Using SMR aware pacing allows us to safely bring the image out.
Stood in a box since the last house move, woken today: stiction. Removing heads from platters requires patience and head-swap bench work, not percussion.
The MQ04ABF100 and ST1000LM048 are used in machines which hit the floor and cause the heads to strike. Donor stack on the head-swap bench, then the clone.
A drive answering at walking pace is failing in instalments. The strategy should be as short as possible: get an image now, do the worst areas last.
Relocation records build up in the service area until your Blue reads like treacle. Clear them down the diagnostic port and you'll find the platters have been fine the whole time.
The Toshiba P300 is the default drive for self-builders and a common head-wear patient. So we keep its donor slot in our rack warm.
Age or a static shock will kill the very small amplifier riding on the actuator, and all your heads go silent. The only solution is to use a full replacement donor stack.
Powering that clicky drive one more time puts arcs onto the disk platter. After this, we take an image of what is left surrounding those arcs.
5 figure hour counts (or greater) show up with Exos 7E8s, X16s and Ultrastar 7K4000s. While better metallurgy can delay the inevitable, it cannot stop it.
Units with He8 class and X16 have heads floating in helium; when the seals start leaking, the head fly height changes and so does the error rate. Get an image as soon as possible, but don't open it unless you are in a lab.
Fluid bearings give a clue to impending retirement with a low pitch hum under load, then runout, followed by servo trouble. Take the image before the wobble wins.
The bumpers and gaskets from back in those days emit gases when they degrade, leaving an oily film on the heads and landing zones. It's a loft-archive speciality, and exactly what the head-swap bench is for.
If you interrupt a shingled drive while it is actively reorganising its media cache, it may lose track of the plot, resulting in repeated "busy" messages or writes that never arrived. Working from a complete image resolves this issue.
Lid removed at home, a thumb on the top platter, then posted to us with a self-deprecating note. In many cases these units are still recoverable, however each fingerprint takes another chunk out of your data.
A hard disk drive consists of a stack of flat polished disks spinning inside a casing, read and written by magnetic heads that fly closer to the face of the disk than the width of a single human hair. That precision works for years, then fails all at once. Most people find a hard disk data recovery service the long way round: they download a free data recovery package, run it once or twice, reboot nervously, and finally turn to the search bar. If the problem is logical, no harm will be done; but if the heads have failed, running the software multiple times risks physically damaging your data, because each pass is another lap of a malfunctioning mechanism over your data. Drives from all the major manufacturers, including Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, Hitachi GST and Samsung, come through our lab on a regular basis, from laptop hard disk drives to surveillance drives. Most of our work is physical hard disk data recovery: head swaps performed on the head-swap bench, motor seizure repair (freeing up a motor that has seized), and sourcing replacement components (donor parts) from compatible products that match the original unit. If yours clicks or has been dropped, power it off and leave it off. Drives don't heal.
Every winter, storm-season power surges cause damage to controller boards along the A19 and A59 corridors. The solution is always a matched (identical) donor printed circuit board (PCB) with the drive's unique Read-Only Memory (ROM) carried across, never a guess. Sector-by-sector imaging of your drive using hardware designed specifically for unreliable/unstable media completes the repair process. In addition, firmware that has lost its own translation tables, bad sectors that are "infecting" other areas of the disk, and deleted hard drive data recovery after a user has formatted their disk thinking it was a good idea at the time are typical bench tasks. While York and North Yorkshire account for most of our diary, tracked post means we provide hard drive recovery throughout the United Kingdom. As soon as you have your quote, a properly packaged drive from anywhere in the country will be on our bench the next working day. It is because of this that our hard drive recovery services include postcodes from many counties outside the York city walls. A hard disk drive recovery service involves mainly patience, matching the right part(s), and knowing when to quit: not glamorous work, but the goal is to recover your files.
You have been warned: capability is determined by equipment. Each and every hard drive that comes to York Data Recovery goes through the following process:
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.
All electronic repairs are performed under the microscope with the ROM of the original drive transferred onto a suitable donor board. Leave any "adaptives" behind and you now have a very quiet paperweight.
A one-way physical valve to prevent anything we do at our end from writing a single byte to your drive. This includes everything from booking in to handing back.
An intake log (not a brochure). The Exos and Ultrastar units are pulled from small server rooms on Clifton Moor and Monks Cross; IronWolf and Red Plus units get pulled from household NAS devices; the DM008 books itself in by playing dead under shingled write pressure; and we still see an example most months of how well the ST3000DM001 has been able to maintain its "reputation". Diagnosis comes at no cost and takes less than two working days, and yes, the old legacy shelf still reads IDE drives older than our new apprentice.
Blue in the family tower, Red Plus watching the NAS, Gold in the rack, WD_BLACK with the gamers: WD's colour chart tells us what we do every week, and no model gets imaged here as often as the WD20EARZ. WD's slow-moving illness is a service area clogged by relocation records: identified, then extremely slow to read. Once the silt has been cleared using the manufacturer's diagnostic mode, the platters image as though nothing ever occurred. The second consistent problem from WD is drops and knocks: matched donor heads, fitted on our head-swap bench, fix these problems.
No logo appears on the booking form more often. The shingled ST2000DM008 fakes its own death under heavy writes but is rarely dead. DM family firmware seizures park a healthy mechanism at "busy" or 0 GB, and we bring it back up through the terminal without lifting the cover; and the ST3000DM001 has an affinity for cutting off its own heads which has kept a full time donor rack busy for ten years now. Completing the set are knock-induced clickers: head-swap bench, donors, image. And lastly, the ultra-thin ST1000LM048 provides a flourish: crawling so well that it gets reported as failed when it simply needs patience.
Deskstar and Travelstar started out as IBM lines; later it was Hitachi, and most recently HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital. Every vintage still gets pulled out of North Yorkshire loft clearouts and office clearances. The house failure is a head stack wearing out one surface at a time: errors accumulate on a single platter face, reads slow to a crawl, and finally ticking replaces mounting. We image surface by surface, taking what the strong heads can still read before donors take on what is left over. Ultrastar 7K4000s as well as HGST's helium-filled He8s arrive off small servers with hour counts into the tens of thousands and, when the seal holds, image like gentlemen.
Deskstar and Travelstar were part of IBM's product line until IBM sold them off in 2003, and the 75GXP earned a nickname the industry will remember long after. Every now and again IDE era survivors pop up in retired towers holding the only copy of the old accounts. Twenty years of doing nothing (standing still) is enough time for spindles to seize up, lubricants to thicken, and heads to weld themselves to platters, so, prior to putting even a single volt through it, any such unit gets a full inspection on the bench. PATA adapters and donors from past decades sit permanently on the legacy shelf, and a vintage badge has never yet condemned the data underneath.
First get a quote via the free online diagnostic, or ring our team on the telephone. Then remove the drive from your PC before you send it in. If unsure, please ring us on 0800 689 0668, and one of our staff will guide you through this process, or alternatively any local computer shop should be able to do it for a minimal fee.
Is the drive still bolted inside a desktop, laptop or server? It must be removed before sending it off. Bare drives are all our workshop can accept, and removing drives from the machine is up to yourself. Generally there are only a few screws holding things together, and for small costs most computer repair shops in York will do this for you. Each server disk comes out as well, every one, and each is labelled with the bay number it was installed in. Please get your quote first on 0800 689 0668 or with the free online diagnostic tool, and then post. There is one hard rule, said once: storage soldered into a motherboard is beyond what we can recover, so if you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
Get a quote first, by calling us on 0800 689 0668 or using our free online diagnostic tool. After receiving your quote, tracked and insured post is how nearly every job reaches us: it is the fastest and safest way to get your drive to our lab in Leeds. There's no collection service, so the parcel is yours to send, or you can hand it in at the Leeds lab's reception.
Is the hard drive or SSD still inside a machine, such as a laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV/DVR system or server? Please remove the hard drive or SSD from the machine first and then post just the bare drive by itself; we do not provide a service for removing drives from devices. For a server or RAID, send every disk, each clearly marked with its bay. For a NAS, send its disks labelled by bay if you can remove them, otherwise send the NAS itself. We cannot work on storage soldered to the motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs, T2 Macs and certain slim laptops): if it doesn't come out, it can't come in. If you are unsure whether your storage is removable, call us before sending.
↓ 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.
Can't figure out what to pack? Ring 0800 689 0668 first, or try our free online diagnostic tool.
Free diagnosis, fixed written quote, and on most work you only pay if we recover your data. Start online or call our freephone.