The drive works and Windows does not
Boot failure, corrupted operating system, interrupted update. The disk is fine and the machine is broken. The files come off with an adapter or live USB and nothing is repaired.
Not a drive fault
If you searched “data recovery near me” then don't worry about finding an office along your route. What really matters is a quality in house operation with the right equipment and secure, careful treatment of your drives. We will provide full coverage of Greater Manchester as we can be easily accessed either by bringing it into us or sending it to us via postal service, fully insured. Repair is only one aspect of a larger hard drive recovery service. The second aspect is recovering data from those drives which are beyond repair.
We are located at: Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5AN; Monday to Friday 9 am – 5:30 pm.
What that term means in this industry is very different from what it may have meant when used in another context, and whether or not you use that term correctly determines what you need to ask for.
Yes, hard drives are repaired — donor head assemblies are fitted to the drive, circuit board rebuilds occur at the component level, seized platter packs are moved to a donor chassis and the firmware module is rebuilt. This is true engineering and it occurs regularly.
The only thing not happening here is repairing a drive so you may continue to use it. When a drive’s head stack is replaced, that drive becomes a recovery vehicle: it will read well enough for one image to be taken from it and then will be decommissioned. No one puts that drive back into their laptop since as soon as your data is safe – the drive has completed its duty – and wouldn’t be reliable anyway.
When someone asks "Can you repair my hard drive?", they're usually asking "Can you get my files off it?" And, that is what we do. That is why our pricing includes that service.
And in two of them nothing needs to be fixed.
Boot failure, corrupted operating system, interrupted update. The disk is fine and the machine is broken. The files come off with an adapter or live USB and nothing is repaired.
In many cases, external hard drives have a bad connection to the internal hard drive. The disk inside is healthy but the connector board in the external case fails. Anyone with some basic tools can replace a broken external case except on WD units, because the encryption key is stored on that board.
Making clicking noises? Grinding noises? Not spinning? These need mechanical work using donor parts. Your data may be recovered, however, the resulting product is simply the recovered data — the original device will never function again as intended.
Parts for repairing a USB stick cost less than the labour needed to repair it. Most sticks are one part enclosures. In addition, when we recover your data, the stick does not go back into service.
Taken directly from customer enquiries by telephone.
No. In fact the drive will have mapped the bad sectors to good ones automatically, and once your drive has started to run out of spares, the deterioration only goes one way. What you need to do is copy the information off before the drive fails completely.
You can. But no matter how many times you re-format, you will never be able to "fix" what was wrong with your drive physically. On a drive that has been deteriorating due to increasing sector failure, a re-format gives you a blank drive that is still failing.
For a board, yes, if the original ROM chip is transplanted onto the replacement board. Modern hard-drives store the calibration information on a per-drive basis in the ROM chip. As far as replacing heads goes, that is only a means to read the drive once.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It doesn't cost anything to find out if it does. Cables go bad, ports go bad, and so does an external power supply. All of these can be mistaken for a dead drive.
This is rarely worth attempting. If a drive has failed once, you have been given an indication of what will happen next time. Get the files off the failed unit; get a replacement unit — a new drive is cheaper than recovering your lost data and certainly cheaper than doing this twice.
All prices are plus VAT. All prices are fixed in writing after a free 48-hour diagnostic.
£300 — single hard drives, SSDs, laptops, desktops and external drives
£250 — USB sticks and memory cards
from £500 — RAID arrays, NAS units and servers
£800 flat — BitLocker-encrypted drives
£400 flat — CCTV or DVR recorders
Most things cost nothing if they fail. Where mechanical work and donor parts are required, we require a 50% deposit as our costs for mechanical work and the donor parts are incurred prior to knowing what condition the disk is in — so the balance is only due upon successful retrieval of your files.
We are based at Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN and are available to speak with customers every day Monday to Friday from 9am until 5:30 pm. Call us on 0161 871 0788, drop it in or post it insured from anywhere in the UK. The cost of sending it back to you, postage paid, is also included in our price. If our free diagnostic examination indicates that the problem lies outside the drive itself, we’ll let you know instead of carrying out repairs that don’t need doing.
Yes, physically. Using new donor heads, board level repair, firmware reconstruction etc. However, they’re not going to be suitable for further use. Once repaired, drives can be used to image data once; after which they should be treated as unreliable.
The two jobs are identical. What makes a failed drive readable again is the purpose of a repair. Therefore, what you are paying for is the recovery process – which starts at £300 + VAT per single drive. The cost of replacing the drive after it has been repaired will be much less expensive than either.
Not usefully. Drives map out bad sectors as they come up to spare areas automatically. Once the spare areas begin to fill, then the only direction the problem can go is downhill. The correct thing to do is to get all of your data copied off the drive before you run out.
A lot of times. And generally at less expense. On external drives, for example, failure of the case (enclosure) and/or the circuit board (bridge) is at least as likely as failure of the drive itself. There's an exception to this rule; i.e., on WD drives, the encryption key resides on the circuit board within the enclosure, therefore do not dispose of either one.
No, and no supplier is going to offer that — the cost of the individual parts would be less than the cost of labour, and most modern USB thumbsticks are a single sealed unit. The stick may have its data extracted, which is what the questioner typically wants. This starts from £250 plus VAT. However, the stick cannot be returned to service after such recovery.
We extract data from those. Which is what the questioner typically means. Contact details: Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, Monday to Friday 9 am to 5:30 pm. Alternatively, you can send us your item insured via the post from anywhere in the UK, and we'll provide free return postage.
Either hand in your device at our office in Manchester or send it to us via the postal system with insurance. Either way, we'll give you a complimentary evaluation of your device, a written quote for whatever work we need to perform, and on most jobs there's nothing to pay should we fail to recover your data.