Whichever drive holds the only copy is the one that's going to end up on the floor. Portable drives and mains units arrive at this workbench in every state: clicking, beeping, blinking or just sitting there silently. They go home with their data readable on new media. LaCie is a house speciality here. If that's the logo on your case, read the LaCie section before plugging your cable into it. External drive repair and external drive recovery are exactly the same process here: we remove the outer housing (enclosure), and then work on the internal hard drive directly.
Each of your external drive jobs is evaluated for no charge. The fixed price given to you is in writing prior to us taking any tools out.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. The exceptions are electronic/mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and forensic jobs. All pricing information can be found on the data recovery cost page.
The first step with all external devices is to determine which type of fault the symptom is related to. For the past twenty-odd years, these twenty-five have covered nearly every fault that reaches this bench.
Most external drives die when the head meets the platter. Every subsequent power-up thereafter puts the data stored on the platter at risk. Once the head hits the platter, no matter how many times you try to read from it, trying again gains you nothing.
There is something within the chain (the bridge board, the electronics on the drive itself, or the firmware) that has failed. Meanwhile the internal hard drive is good but has no voice. It is a staffing problem, and we can fix that by diagnosing which component has failed.
If you pull a cord during writing and the file table becomes shredded as a result, you will receive that exact prompt. Everything behind it is fine. Refuse flatly, unplug it, and let it sit until you have obtained your quote and it is posted.
A spindle motor straining against stuck heads, and morse code broadcast through the plastic. Unplug it and don't try again. Get a quote first. Then send it in as is.
WD actually puts the encryption straight onto the USB board itself. Put the naked hard disk into a nice caddy (with fingers crossed) and all you'll see is static labelled with filenames. And so the entire chain needs to move across as one, and here this is exactly what happens.
Desktop mains powered units typically fail at the power stage. Some of these can be repaired at the cheapest price and some can be the most difficult repairs on the premises, and the free diagnostic determines which one you have.
When bad sectors start to appear on the march, even a simple file copy becomes treacle. The imaging equipment is generally much faster than the rate of failure. However if repeated attempts are made to do a hopeful file copy, then the failure increases, thereby reducing the amount of time you have left.
Data lost to deletion and formatting on an external device recovers well, but there is one important condition to this recovery process: the drive must be immediately powered down and remain powered off. Any actions performed using the drive after this point will reduce your chances of successful recovery.
Hard winter weather causes pipes to burst; drives also get submerged underwater. Drives can withstand far more of this type of abuse than owners would ever think possible. We clean the drive, stabilise it and transplant the platter(s) where the mechanical parts will no longer turn.
Knock one of Seagate's smallest portable devices and it responds by clicking away like clockwork. In reality, there isn't nearly enough space inside for things to improve on their own. Stacks of donor drives sit right next to that workbench.
The orange rubber around a LaCie helps confidence more than it helps physics. One landing too many and you have a standard head job wearing an unusually smart jacket.
Years of nightly backups work the micro-B port on the Toshiba loose, after which it connects only at particular angles. Reflowed under the scope or bypassed entirely while imaging runs.
T7 units and SanDisk Extreme portables exit electronically with no click at all, since nothing inside one is capable of clicking. Flash bench jobs in external clothing.
Pulling it out without ejecting works fine until the day it does not, then nothing will mount it. Reassembled from a complete capture rather than repaired where it lies.
Someone caught the lead and the port came with it. Pads get rebuilt under magnification, or the bare disk gets imaged directly when the board is past helping.
Shingled media turns up inside a great many newer 2.5-inch externals. Under a large copy it stalls, then leaves the bus altogether. We image at whatever pace shingled recording accepts.
Round-the-clock use is what NAS drives are designed to handle, and a portable run that way wears out years ahead of schedule because nobody designed it for that.
Portable SSD bargains often consist of an inexpensive memory card, a bridge IC and a professionally finished enclosure. Whatever made it onto the memory card can be retrieved. That said, the enclosure has no value to anyone.
When using bus power via a long cable, or through a hub with no inherent power supply, the drive will brown out over and over, invisibly, during a write operation. This damage continues to build up as additional data writes are performed, but can be reversed from a full image.
The encryption is genuine; that's just the problem. Hand over your password and the job will be routine. But without one you get a straight answer instead of hope billed by the hour.
Any interrupted backups cause corruption to the bundle until restore operations stop working altogether. We fix the band files first, then dig into the backup history to find whatever versions really matter.
A bare hard disk that has been shucked out of a budget external enclosure to save a few pounds can be plugged into a PC's internal SATA ports but may fail to spin, due to how one single pin on the SATA power connector is used. The symptoms include no spinning at all (the same symptom you see with a completely dead or failed drive). The drive is fine, though. It's worth ruling this out before anyone assumes the worst.
Windows cannot read Apple file systems, therefore Windows responds as if the disk is empty and unformatted; Windows then provides you with an 'offer'. If you accept the offer, a new partition table is placed atop a completely intact one. If you decline, there is no cost incurred to you since the original Apple file system reads perfectly fine on the correct machine.
The drives that live on boats, yards next to the water, or workshops in Peterhead are exposed to wet air and constant low-level vibrations. The vibration will wear down the bearings while the damp corrosion will attack the connections, and the pair of them arrive together after roughly three seasons.
A repair utility can cause damage to a disk with many bad sectors, and the process is slow moving as well. This occurs because the repair utility rewrites structures from data it can't read reliably, and it continues this for many hours. Get a quote first, then send the unit to us unrepaired. Undoing repairs performed on an original is much more difficult than performing them on a copy.
Take an external, strip it down to just its internal parts and all that is left is a bare 2.5-inch (or 3.5-inch) hard drive. That's it. That's all there is to it. The WD My Passport and Elements. Toshiba Canvio Basics and Advance. Seagate Expansion, Backup Plus, One Touch. Buffalo MiniStation, Verbatim Store 'n' Save, Iomega, LaCie. All of the techniques we use for recovering data from disks are applicable directly to these external drives as well: donor heads, motor repair, swapping boards while carrying your ROM over, and patient imaging. External drives do punish the components, though. These units live in camera cases, in kit bags going out to job sites, on the corner of a desk one elbow away from the floor. Drop a spinning hard drive onto something solid and the heads land. This is how so many of our externals arrive clicking. There isn't another sound in the building more common than that. Photographers, surveyors and site engineers keep their careers on these units, and we treat each unit accordingly. They also post very well, and this is where a professional data recovery service becomes geographically neutral: we operate as a data recovery service throughout the UK, and a boxed drive posted from anywhere in the country reaches the bench on the next working day.
Take the governing fact for every LaCie job as the beginning. Every LaCie has either a Seagate or Toshiba mechanism inside, and there's nothing more unusual there than that, since LaCie has been owned by Seagate for many years. So the enclosure comes off, the bare disk comes out, and the job becomes a standard "drive" job: matching donor heads, attention to the motor where the spindle has gone, a donor board carrying your original ROM, followed by a slow full image. With the lid off, that is the entire scope of LaCie data recovery. This also explains why anyone hoping to repair LaCie external hard drive hardware ends up with a basic "disk" job about ten minutes after it arrives here. The beeping is misinterpreted more often than any other symptom in this industry. A LaCie hard drive beeping is not a sign of death. It is simply the spindle motor attempting to spin, failing, and trying again about once a second. Two primary reasons account for just about all of it. One is supply. Bus powered 2.5-inch devices draw their entire supply from the USB port. The Rugged series does, as do all of the brushed-aluminium Porsche Design mobile drives. If the cable supplying power is worn out, if they're running off an unpowered hub, or if they're sharing a USB socket on a very thin laptop, it's possible to leave them a little bit shy of what it takes to start spinning. The other is mechanical: a seized spindle bearing, or heads that have settled down onto the platters and stuck. You cannot resolve the latter problem by swapping out cables; each time you try, it only gets worse. Knowing the range helps here too. Rugged models sport the orange rubber bumper, are bus powered, and are designed for exactly the handling they get. Rugged SSD versions don't have any moving parts inside, and they fail the way any other SSD fails. All of the desktop units are supplied from their own mains adapter: d2, d2 Professional, 2big, 2big Dock. A bad power brick can simulate a dead drive perfectly, so it makes sense to rule this out before you pay for postage. Lastly, regarding encryption: most of the LaCie enclosures pass the disk through in the clear, making them significantly easier to deal with than WD portable drives. The Secure models are the exception, along with anything encrypted via LaCie's own software, and neither goes anywhere without the credentials.
Take a recent WD portable, pull the mechanism out and hook it up to a plain SATA connection, and the screen will be filled with noise. This is intended. On these units, the tiny USB bridge acts as a part of the encryption process, so when the disk is separated from its bridge, the drive becomes unreadable as a matter of design. A good number of the more agitated phone calls we get begin during this exact phase of experimentation at someone's kitchen table. It is a routine problem. If the original bridge continues to function, it will decrypt the data. If it has stopped functioning, a donor board plus a reconstructed key chain does the same job. Regardless of which route it takes, what should return is your folder structure, in order, instead of a full screen of static.
An external is a bare drive dressed up in an enclosure, therefore the entire drive workshop applies, with input from the bridge specialists:
Drive firmware rig. It enables service mode, rebuilds translators, trims defect tables and reads locked firmware zones. Downloadable software reaches none of that; this is why so many of these are condemned long before anyone competent has even had a chance to take a look.
Failing drives are copied head by head while monitoring the current draw throughout. Hardware timeouts are measured per sector; consequently an awkward area can add minutes to the process rather than reducing the life expectancy of the drive.
Lids come off on the bench only. House dust is larger than the flying height of the heads, so if you remove a lid at a kitchen table it has already cost you something.
Combs, jigs, lifters. A head stack or entire platter pack can be moved from one chassis to another with no two surfaces touching. This principle is applied to each job regardless of what your deadline is.
Sorted by model, firmware family and factory code. When working on a head stack, close enough is not good enough. Therefore, sorting earns its keep. Most of the time, parts for jobs are already on-site.
Imaging of self encrypting portable drives (WD above all) is done via their original interface circuitry. When the original circuit board dies, the encryption chain is rebuilt to allow for imaging to take place without using that board.
Our interface cards are held on our own racks and carefully matched, which allows the encryption from the drive to remain with the drive when we replace the interface card.
Counting by the number of units arriving, Expansion and Passport units are leading the table, and T7-class solid-state units are making a small gain each quarter. We can identify two standing notes from the log. First, when using Western Digital (WD) drives, the encryption function is performed by the USB interface board; therefore, if that bridge dies it forces the entire chain across, as opposed to attempting different caddy configurations in hopes of finding one that works. Second, due to limited space within these drives, the slimmest Seagate portable hard drives respond to any tap or knock with audible clicking. Retired badges pulled out of storage drawers strip down to ordinary mechanisms that our donor racks have covered for years, so repairing an orphaned brand like this would be considered routine.
No one is left at Iomega who you can call. EMC took the name from Iomega, Lenovo took it after that, and eventually the name was discontinued. However, the drawers always continue to produce these drives: colourful, portable eGo models, desktops that served as home archives for ten years, and untouched Home Media boxes from when the kids left. An orphaned brand doesn't mean an unrecoverable drive. Remove the casing and there will be a mechanism from Samsung, Seagate or WD of a kind our racks have stocked spare parts for since the product was new. The imaging route on these legacy units is exactly the same as it would be for a modern drive that you purchase today. First get a quote on your unit, then post us the whole unit in its enclosure along with its own cable and power supply, or drop it off at our Edinburgh lab (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, no appointment needed). This business also involves prising open awkward legacy enclosures and taking care not to damage anything inside them.
LaCie kit is designed for people who move their equipment around on a regular basis, which is the same habit that eventually wears the kit out. A Rugged carried in a camera bag along the coast, or a d2 parked under an editing desk: both get shifted about, and a spinning platter's worst enemy is movement. Set a Rugged down hard while its platters are still turning and the head stack pays for it, orange rubber or not. The mains-powered ranges fail down a completely different path, losing an interface board while the disk behind it stays in fine order. Since Seagate absorbed the brand, there is no longer a manufacturer route, so the job ends up in a workshop instead. The shell comes off, the bare disk is imaged, and new heads go in where that landing demands them. Your projects are handed back from the copy.
The best approach is to treat a My Passport as one single sealed piece of hardware rather than as a disk inside a case. The USB connector attaches directly to the circuitry board of the hard drive itself; additionally, hardware based encryption resides within the silicon of this same circuitry board. If the electronics are destroyed then your data remains encrypted just where it was when the electronics were working properly. Insert the "naked" disk into a spare caddy and what you will see is nothing but static and some file names. We have donor boards available for both the WDBPKJ and the WDBYVG generations, and fitting either board takes the encryption chain across intact. This is essentially the one step that separates a Passport that never shows up again from a Passport that mounts. As far as the My Book units are concerned, they go a completely different way: the power brick goes first and the bridge next, both wrapped round a mechanism that proves to be in good condition.
Every injury a 2.5-inch portable can suffer gets collected by a MiniStation eventually. Drops on floors. A socket worked loose. Sector damage showing up on a schedule it sets for itself. Buffalo's mains-powered DriveStation line typically outlasts both its power supply and its interface board, while the disk carries on regardless, which is good news presented as bad. Several of the MiniStation models have hardware encryption built in, and given the password, that layer is opened during the work, so everything that comes back reads as ordinary files. In every case, the running order never changes: we remove the outer casing, create a full sector image, and perform the recovery on the copy and on nothing else.
Get a quote first by telephone or use our free online diagnostic. Most of what you see on this bench will then be delivered via tracked, insured post. This is one of the safest ways to move a failing drive and packages handed in at a North-East post office are normally delivered here the next working day.
Still attached to a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV/DVR unit? Remove the hard drive or SSD first. The bare drive travels on its own; when removing disks from a server remove all the disks and label each disk by its bay. This lab does not take machines apart. Any storage that has been soldered onto a motherboard (as in T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and a couple of thin laptops) will not be worked on: if it will not unbolt, we cannot work on it. If you're not sure what type of machine you have, ring us first. Phones and tablets are also not taken on.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Your parcel should be addressed to Edinburgh Data Recovery, approximately two and a half hours (and 130 miles) from Aberdeen via the A90; alternatively it can reach us the next working day by tracked post if this journey time / distance is prohibitive to travel. As soon as your drive has been scheduled in we will contact you.
Still unsure about what should be placed inside of the packaging? Please call us first on 0800 689 0668, or use our free online diagnostic tool to assist you in deciding which items belong inside of the packaging before sealing.
Free diagnosis, one fixed price quoted in writing, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start online or phone it in.