Don’t assume right away that the worst has happened; instead, begin working outward: power adapter, cable, another port, another computer. Many completely dead drives are really just good drives whose power supply died — and when the fault is genuinely inside the drive, it’s usually electrical so the platters and your information are intact behind it.
More often than not a non-functioning drive is either a power problem or a cable problem rather than being dead itself — and when the drive itself is truly dead, then most of the time the cause is an electronic failure, leaving the platters and your data intact behind the electronics.
The majority of “dead” drives that we receive here have not had these tests completed and a significant number of them did not need to come into our lab at all.
All 3.5-inch external drives and older desktop enclosures will draw their power through an external AC/DC adapter. These adapters tend to fail much more frequently than the drive they are powering. Replace the original adapter with a new one matching voltage, polarity and amperage as indicated by the label.
USB and SATA cables can fail inside but you won't see anything that's happening on the outside. This is why you should always plug the cable into the machine itself and never through a hub or monitor — a bus-powered 2.5-inch hard drive could simply fail to start up because of a lack of sufficient current to make it spin.
In about a minute you can tell whether the problem lies with the drive or with the machine, drivers or controllers. This is also the check people most often skip.
When powering up put your finger on top of the case and feel for vibration. If there is some vibration, although very weak, the motor is spinning and therefore your failure has occurred electronically or as part of the firmware. When there is no vibration whatsoever, your drive is not receiving any electrical signal to cause it to turn.
Once you have completed the external testing, the issue is now internal — and they appear identical.
The most common good-intentioned suggestion made by the Internet community and it hasn't been accurate for two decades.
Drive boards have carried adaptive calibration data unique to each drive since approximately 2005 – head resistance values, preamp settings and defect maps – stored in a small read-only memory (ROM). The values are about that particular mechanism and no other.
If you fit a replacement board without moving over the original ROM from your old board, then one of two things happens. Most commonly, nothing will occur; the drive won’t spin, or spins and is never detected, and you’ve just wasted time/money finding out. Less frequently, the new board may cause damage to your original mechanism as it tries to run your mechanism using the calibration of another drive. When the job is diagnosed as a board repair, that means repairing the original board or transplanting its ROM into a matching replacement board; both of these repairs are standard bench work using proper equipment.
Board work is typically a quicker process than some of our other types of jobs, when that is what it turns out to be.
A single drive that will not power on is from £300 + VAT; we do a free 48-hour diagnostic to confirm. Most jobs cost nothing if they fail; where we have to open the drive, or fit additional components from a donor device, we take a 50% deposit. The balance is due on success.
If the diagnostic shows there has been surge damage to the board but all other mechanisms are intact, it often takes just days, not weeks. Please send us the bare hard disk, where you can, or the entire unit if it is an external device that comes with its own power supply.
Please send us your device along with a brief description of what happened. This diagnostic process has no cost and the price for the next phase of service will be fixed in writing prior to commencing work.
This is the only step that requires input from you and nothing else can happen until the device is on our bench. Package your item properly and include all the information we require about you and your item(s), then ship them to us. Then comes a no-cost diagnostic, followed by a written quote.
Posting it? Use a tracked and insured service. The value of what is on the drive far exceeds the cost of postage. Bringing it in? Weekdays from 9am to 5:30pm, and it still needs packing as described above for the journey.
Tell us about the item in question, tell us how it has been behaving lately, and let us know if there is anything you have done as far as troubleshooting goes so that our engineers may provide a realistic estimate of success and a probable cost range prior to sending your items off.
We’ll be in touch shortly. If it’s urgent, call 0161 871 0788.
In cases where a drive draws no electricity – i.e., there's no movement, no clicking, complete silence – it typically has been damaged to the extent that the damage is related to the electronic components of the drive (circuit board). Usually all it takes for a protection diode located on the board to be destroyed is one electrical surge or simply reversing the adapter plugged into it. In terms of repairing that electronic damage, that will require some serious "bench" time. That is a whole lot different from the common "swap the board" solution promoted throughout the Internet. Modern printed circuit boards contain drive-specific calibration stored in read-only memory chips. Therefore, until those chips (or their contents) have been moved over to the new board, a donor board will remain unresponsive. Once done properly, many times a surge-damaged drive will read back in full. One of our recent case files is a good example of this: a WD My Cloud: The Backup Was Never Checked, recovered by precisely this method.
The types of questions we receive most about hard drives that are dead and will not power on.
Most of the time not. Total silence indicates electronic failure more often than it does failure within the mechanics of the disk itself. As such, your data sits safely locked behind a circuit board that failed. This is perhaps one of the most recoverable classifications of failures.
First, prior to shipping your external drive verify the power supply works, on anything with an external brick. Next, verify your cabling. Verify that it makes contact. Finally, try to connect directly into your computer through a different port. If still not functioning, test with a different computer. Many reported instances of "dead" external drives have ultimately turned out to be damaged or defective power supplies.
Not on any modern drive; boards have unique adaptive calibration stored in ROM chips for each specific drive. In other words, when you swap in another board, the original ROM must be placed back into the new board. If you do not put the ROM back in the new board, the drive will do nothing (or the drive may attempt to operate using incorrect calibrations).
Yes; in fact the buzzing typically indicates that the motor is malfunctioning, rather than the board. This could be due to bearings seizing up within the motor or heads bonding themselves to the platter after having sat idle for an extended period. Same rule applies here; stop trying to run the unit, as continued attempts can shear a head from its arm.
It is a protective component located on the drive board designed specifically to short out under extreme conditions of electrical voltage, killing the drive in the process but protecting the rest of the drive's mechanical components from damage. As such, when a TVS diode shorts itself out during a power surge, it effectively sacrifices itself to protect all other parts of the system.
From £300 + VAT after we provide a complimentary 48-hour diagnostics check, with nothing to pay on most jobs if it fails. Work at "board level" is often among the quicker jobs — days rather than weeks where the mechanism is healthy.
Behind every successful repair lies a vast inventory of 10,000 parts and a free written diagnostic report to start, with nothing to pay on most jobs if it fails. Let us begin helping you recover your valuable data today.