Most people search for hard drive repair. What a failed drive actually needs is to be made readable once, imaged, and then retired — because a disk fitted with donor parts is a recovery vehicle, not a drive to trust again. Here is what fails, how each fault is handled, and what it costs. Looking for hard drive repair? It usually means something different from what you expect.
$ mdr diagnose /dev/sdb → Device: Seagate Barracuda · 2 TB → Status: CLICKING — head crash, will not spin → Client: confidential · Manchester, Greater Manchester $ mdr engineer-working → Read-write heads: replaced · matched donor → Service area: firmware modules repaired → Imaging: 1.9 TB / 2 TB · 9sectors mapped $ mdr verify → ✓ documents — 18,300 files → ✓ photos — 24,110 files → ✓ drive recovered — data back
Clicking, ticking, grinding or beeping all mean the mechanism, and all get worse with every minute of power. How long a drive runs after the first noise is the single biggest factor in how much comes back — and it is the one thing entirely in your hands.
It is what most people search for, and it is worth being clear about what it does and does not mean.
A failed drive is not repaired and returned to service. Where the fault is mechanical, the drive is opened under filtered air, given a matched donor head assembly, read once, and then retired — a drive fitted with donor parts is a recovery vehicle, not a disk anyone should trust again. Where the fault is electronic or firmware, the repair goes exactly as far as making the drive readable and no further.
So the useful question is not whether the drive can be fixed but whether the data can be read off it once. That is what we do, and it is why we quote for a recovery rather than a repair. If someone offers to repair a clicking drive and hand it back working, be careful — that is not how this ends.
You do not need to know what has failed. Describe the behaviour and the fault class usually follows from it.
The diagnostic exists so that you are deciding with real information rather than a range.
The drive is booked in on arrival and examined without being powered where the symptoms suggest mechanical damage — the family, firmware revision and head configuration are identified first. Where it is safe to do so, it is connected to diagnostic hardware rather than a computer, so nothing writes to it and nothing tries to mount it.
What comes back to you is a written answer to four questions: what has actually failed, whether the platters are damaged, what proportion of the data is realistically recoverable, and one fixed price. That last part matters — a quote that moves once the drive is open is the commonest complaint in this trade, and ours does not. If the honest answer is that nothing can be recovered, or that a piece of software would have done the job, you get that instead of an invoice.
Less a capability list than an accurate picture of the bench.
Most weeks the bulk is 2.5-inch laptop drives and USB-powered portables — Seagate and Western Digital dominate simply because they dominate the shelves. Behind those come desktop 3.5-inch drives from failed towers, then NAS disks pulled from Synology and QNAP units, and a steady trickle of drives from machines that stopped being made a long time ago.
That last group is worth mentioning because people assume it is hopeless. IDE and PATA drives, SCSI, twenty-year-old Maxtors and Quantums out of industrial equipment and lab instruments — the recovery is well understood and the difficulty is sourcing a donor, which affects how long it takes rather than whether it can be done. Toshiba, Hitachi and HGST, Samsung, Fujitsu and the legacy names all pass through.
Published rather than quoted case by case, so you can check it against anyone else’s.
A single hard drive is from £300 +VAT — internal, external or laptop, and the same whether the fault turns out to be a dead board or a failed head-stack. Drives that form part of a RAID, NAS or server are array work and start from £500 +VAT.
Where it splits is the deposit. Most jobs run no fix, no fee: recovery fails, you pay nothing. Where the drive has to be opened in clean air or fitted with donor parts, those costs are committed the moment the work starts, so there is a 50% deposit with the balance payable only if the recovery succeeds. You will know which of the two applies before you agree to anything.
Get the drive to us with a short note on the fault. The diagnostic costs nothing, and the figure that follows is fixed in writing before any work begins.
Nothing can begin until the device is on the bench, which makes this the only step that needs anything from you. Pack it properly, put your details in with it, and send it over. What follows is a free diagnostic and a written figure, in that order.
Posting it? Use something tracked and insured — whatever is on the drive is worth considerably more than the postage. Bringing it in? Weekdays, 9am to 5:30pm, and it still wants packing as above for the journey.
Not sure it is worth sending? Tell us about the drive and fault, plus anything already attempted — an engineer reads every one of these and comes back with an honest view of the odds and a price band, before you post anything.
We’ll be in touch shortly. If it’s urgent, call 0161 871 0788.
Because we work at platform and firmware level rather than through consumer brand utilities, the label on the enclosure rarely sets the method: Western Digital (Blue, Black, Red, Gold, Ultrastar), Seagate (Barracuda, IronWolf, Exos and Rescue-bundled drives), Toshiba, Hitachi/HGST, Samsung and legacy Maxtor all get the same discipline — stabilise the mechanics, carry the adaptives across, rebuild the service area, image read-only. Firmware families vary; the imaging-first approach doesn’t.
The technical questions we get most about failed hard drives.
Not in a way that returns it to service. Recovery means repairing the drive just far enough to read it once — donor heads under filtered air, board repair, or service-area work — then imaging it. The objective is your data, not a working disk, and a drive fitted with donor parts should never be trusted again.
Because the heads cannot locate their servo positioning data, so the assembly retracts to its stop, recalibrates and tries again. That retraction is the click. It usually means the heads are damaged or failing, and every rotation risks scoring the surface holding your files.
Typically firmware rather than mechanics. Drives load their operating code from a reserved service area on the platters, and if a module becomes unreadable the drive cannot describe itself — so it reports no capacity or a blank model while sounding perfectly healthy. The data is generally untouched.
From £300 plus VAT for a single drive, fixed in a written quote after a free 48-hour diagnostic. Most jobs are no fix, no fee; clean-air and donor work carries a 50% deposit with the balance due only on success.
Yes, and often — frequently out of industrial and lab equipment where the drive is older than the building’s IT policy. The recovery is well understood; sourcing a donor for an unusual model affects the timescale rather than whether it can be done.
Peter House on Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, Monday to Friday 9am to 5:30pm — or post it insured from anywhere in the UK. Send the bare drive rather than the whole machine where you can; externals should come complete with their enclosure.
Every mechanical drive ever sold uses the same physics, so the make matters less than the fault — but donor parts have to match the family, head count and firmware revision exactly, which is where knowing a manufacturer’s range earns its keep.
Names with an arrow have a guide of their own — brand-specific faults, and what they mean for a recovery.
One fixed figure at £300 +VAT for a single drive, agreed in writing after the free diagnostic and unchanged afterwards. Clean-air work and donor parts where the fault is mechanical, and on most jobs nothing to pay if the data does not come back.