Everybody's first instinct is to reach for another cable. Leave that for sixty seconds and watch the thing instead. Light on? Any faint tremor through the casing that says platters are turning? Any noise it was not making a month ago? Those three observations drop nearly every vanished drive into one of three categories — a connection fault, a broken filing structure, or hardware that is dying — and each wants a completely different response. Guessing narrows nothing. A minute of attention narrows it a long way.
One of those three trumps the rest, so deal with it now. Clicking, ticking, beeping, buzzing, or a spin-up that collapses and starts over is a mechanical fault: heads no longer able to read, or a motor struggling to turn. Each additional minute under power drags dead heads over the surfaces your files occupy. Cut the power, leave it out, and skip to the final section. Once a drive has started making noises, nothing in between here applies, and repeating the attempt will not change that.
Begin with the lead, since cables shipped with portable drives are made to a budget and the USB-C ones give out more often than people credit. Next the socket: plug straight into the machine, avoiding hubs, monitors, docking stations and the front sockets on a tower, all of which are less dependable than a port at the back. Then a second computer if one is available. Mains-powered desktop units — a WD My Book, a LaCie d2, a Seagate desktop Expansion — earn one additional suspect. Where such a unit shows nothing whatever, no light, no sound, no hint of spin, the little plug-top adaptor has usually failed rather than the disk inside.
On Windows, the truthful picture lives in Disk Management; right-click the Start button to open it. Two situations matter there. Where the disk appears with a healthy partition but no letter, assigning one is harmless and frequently sorts it outright. Where instead the partition reads RAW or unallocated, or Windows asks permission to initialise the disk, the map describing where everything lives has broken. Your files sit behind that map, intact. Every option offered at this point, initialise especially, lays fresh structures down on top of the old ones — and the old ones are exactly what a recovery reads. Decline the lot and leave the disk alone.
On a Mac the equivalent is Disk Utility, with View set to Show All Devices so the physical disk appears rather than only its volumes. A volume greyed out beneath a device that is otherwise present is normal in these situations and often recovers in full. Two buttons deserve respect. Erase means erase. First Aid drives a struggling mechanism hard for a sustained spell, which is precisely the wrong treatment for a disk that has started to make an unfamiliar sound. One dull possibility to eliminate while you are in there: Windows-formatted media does not mount cleanly under macOS, and Apple-formatted media is invisible to Windows. Some dead drives are merely plugged into the wrong operating system.
Drives up here fail in ways that are worth naming, because the pattern tells you what you are dealing with. Salt air is the first. A drive that has lived in a bag on a boat, in a harbour office, or in a van doing the Peterhead and Fraserburgh run, tends to corrode at the electronics before anything else goes wrong. The symptom is a drive that used to work and now shows no light at all. That is usually a board fault, and board faults are frequently recoverable in full, because the platters never knew anything had happened.
The second is cold. A drive left in an unheated garage or an outbuilding through a hard winter, then carried indoors and plugged straight in, gets condensation inside a mechanism with clearances measured in nanometres. Let it reach room temperature before you power it. The third is vibration, which is the offshore and site-work problem: kit that travels constantly develops mechanical faults months before it announces them, and the first sign is usually a drive that mounts slowly, or mounts one day and not the next. Intermittent is not a mild fault. Intermittent is the warning shot. Copy everything off it that day, because the second failure is normally the permanent one.
There is a clear line. Checking cables, ports and another machine, and looking at Disk Management or Disk Utility, cannot make anything worse. Beyond that line sit the things that do: chkdsk and scan-and-fix on a corrupted volume, First Aid on a noisy disk, initialising, reformatting, and recovery software hammering away at failing hardware for six hours. Consumer recovery tools have a legitimate use — a healthy drive from which files were deleted — and they are actively dangerous everywhere else, because they keep a dying mechanism working flat out at precisely the moment it should be switched off.
When it gets to us, the drive is imaged read-only behind a hardware write-blocker, so nothing is ever written back to your media. The files are then rebuilt from that image. Diagnosis costs nothing and is done inside 2 working days of the parcel landing, after which you get one fixed written figure. Logical faults run no fix, no fee. Mechanical, electrical, water and fire jobs take 50% before the bench work with the rest owed only on a result. Post the bare drive tracked and insured, use a courier you book yourself, or hand it in at our Edinburgh counter — nothing is ever picked up from customers. Ring 0800 689 0668 before you pack it if you are unsure.
If it makes a sound, it gets no further attempts. Nothing a hard drive does audibly improves with more use, and heads that have stopped reading are scoring the surfaces your files sit on. An evening left plugged in has turned plenty of complete recoveries into partial ones. Switch it off, box it, and let somebody look at it properly.
Diagnosis costs nothing and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure is fixed in writing, and logical work runs no fix no fee. Begin online, or lift the phone.