The drive works and Windows does not
Boot failures, a corrupt operating system, an interrupted update. The disk is fine and the machine is broken — the files come off with an adapter or a live USB and nothing is repaired.
Not a drive fault
Searched “data recovery near me”? The thing that matters isn’t a shop down the road — it’s a proper in-house operation with the correct kit and careful, secure handling. We cover the whole of Greater Manchester, and reaching us is easy in two ways: come in and hand it over, or send it to us fully insured by post.
You’ll find us at Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, open weekdays from 9am to 5:30pm.
The word means something different in this trade, and the difference decides what you should be asking for.
Yes, hard drives are repaired — donor head assemblies fitted, circuit boards rebuilt at component level, seized platter packs transferred to a donor chassis, firmware modules reconstructed. That is real engineering and it happens routinely.
What does not happen is repairing a drive so you can carry on using it. A drive with a replaced head-stack is a recovery vehicle: it is made readable long enough to be imaged once, then retired. Nobody puts it back in a laptop, because the moment the data is safe the drive has served its purpose — and it would not be trustworthy anyway.
So the honest translation of “can you repair my hard drive” is almost always “can you get my files off it”. That is the job, and it is what the prices below cover.
And in two of them, nothing needs fixing.
Boot failures, a corrupt operating system, an interrupted update. The disk is fine and the machine is broken — the files come off with an adapter or a live USB and nothing is repaired.
Common on externals: the disk inside is healthy and the interface between it and USB is not. Replacing the enclosure is a repair anyone can do — except on WD units, where the encryption key lives on that board.
Clicking, grinding, not spinning. This genuinely needs clean-air work and donor parts — and the outcome is your data, not a usable drive.
The parts cost less than the labour, and most are a single sealed package. Data comes off; the stick does not go back into service.
Taken from what customers ask on the phone.
Not in a way that helps. A drive already remaps bad sectors to spare ones automatically, and once it starts running out the deterioration is one-way. What you need is the data copied off before there are more.
You can, and it does not repair anything physical. On a drive with rising sector counts, a format produces an empty disk that is still failing.
For a board, yes — with the original ROM chip transplanted across, since modern drives hold per-drive calibration in it. For heads, only as a means to read the drive once.
Sometimes genuinely yes, and it costs nothing to check. Cables, ports and external power supplies all fail and all mimic a dead drive.
Almost never worth it. A drive that has failed once has told you what it is going to do. Recover the data, then replace it — a new drive costs less than the recovery and considerably less than doing this twice.
All plus VAT, 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, and CCTV or DVR recorders
Most work is no fix, no fee. Where clean-air work and donor parts are needed there is a 50% deposit, because those costs are committed before anyone knows what the platters look like — and the balance is payable only on success.
We are at Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, Monday to Friday 9am to 5:30pm, on 0161 871 0788. Drop a drive in or post it insured from anywhere in the UK, with free return shipping either way. And if the free diagnostic shows the drive is healthy and the fault is elsewhere, we tell you that rather than charging for a repair you do not need.
Hand your device in at Manchester, or send it insured through the post. Whichever you choose, you’ll get a no-charge assessment, a price fixed in writing, and no fix, no fee on the bulk of jobs.