The majority of disks that the machine cannot find will still be complete with every file that was ever written to them. This is the general outcome of working on drives, not the lucky exception. Get a quote first, and the hard drive recovery Aberdeen sends us then travels by post or is dropped off at our Edinburgh lab (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, no appointment needed), whether it is coming from Dyce and Bridge of Don, the yards at Altens and Tullos, the farms inland or the boats out of Peterhead and Fraserburgh. Nobody pays a penny before the fault has a name and one fixed figure is sitting there in writing in front of them.
All hard drive diagnostics are done for free. Your fixed price will be provided to you in writing prior to any work being started with any tools.
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 task for a technician on any hard disk is determining what the problem (symptom) is caused by. For at least the last twenty-odd years there have been very few issues that would be brought into this workbench that are not covered by these twenty-five.
Head failure, and nothing else sounds similar. The head stack hunts for servo marks it can no longer resolve, gives up, resets and tries again. Each time the head attempts to resolve the servo mark, it will take another chunk off the surface.
The three silent killers of hard drives are a seized spindle, heads sitting directly on top of the platters, or dead electronic components. A workbench is needed to determine which has happened. Guessing at your desk usually adds a fourth.
No model name is returned even after power is applied. There are two places to blame for this type of problem: the firmware area or the controller board. Do not confuse either of these items as being related to the physical heads or platters. It is repairable work, though never with an Internet downloaded tool and a USB cable.
There are no speakers on a hard drive. When you hear something, this is likely due to the spindle struggling against heads bonded to a platter or a bearing that has locked solid. Attempting to retry tightens it. Switch it off now.
Decay on surface. File browsers hang while copies crawl to completion. As long as this thing has power, the numbers will grow. We therefore remove its power source. An image is made of the drive; the remainder is done on that image.
The internal address map for the drive has failed. Then it will either be stuck busy or claim that it has zero space. This fault was made notorious by Seagate. Every vendor has their own form of this failure. The service terminal is where the work starts.
At thousands of revolutions per minute there is a decision made about who wins at the interface between heads and platters within a heartbeat. That decision cannot be appealed once the decision has been made. Instead, it can only be further damaged when the device is turned back on.
Cheap power supplies, remote areas with long feed lines, and cold winter weather all contribute to the retirement of many drive boards across the North-East. Repairs performed at board level, with the original ROM transplanted across, are ordinary work here.
A quick format will generally leave nearly every piece of information intact. A full format does not. What ultimately determines whether something will remain after a format is how much data has been written onto the drive since. Put it down now, and keep it down.
The partition structures were lost. But all the content was still there underneath. Say no. Accepting that prompt is the single most reliable way for a low-cost job to become an expensive one.
All servo patterns are written at the factory and cannot ever be changed again. A run gets damaged and the head loses its track position in the middle of it and the drive will reset as well, but reads perfectly fine to both sides of those tracks. The damaged zones get mapped and imaged around.
Firmware calibration figures for one specific set of heads reside on a chip attached to the board of that drive. If you swap the board without taking that chip along with it, the drive will spin up sounding perfectly normal but return noise. This happens all the time as people swap boards on a regular basis (weekly).
When a laptop drive parks its heads, they sit on top of a small plastic ramp located near the platters. If the power goes out during the parking sequence or if the ramp wears down so much that the heads land directly on top of the platter instead of landing on the ramp, the stack will stick. Freeing it is bench work, and fine work.
Set from a laptop BIOS, a disk utility, or by someone who was overly diligent about doing so years back. This drive is mechanically perfect, yet completely unreadable. Lock clearing is bench work using firmware, and not an application you buy.
Drives retire failing sectors to spare tracks, and the log recording that has an end. Reach it and the drive hangs, leaves the bus, or just takes forever to start. Most often, the data behind it is much better than what the symptoms would indicate.
ST3000DM001. It earned head-stack failure its notoriety, and we still see it here on the bench most months, usually after being pulled from a machine that was last backed up the day it was purchased. We also make sure that its donor rack is always populated.
If you push sustained writes at either an ST1000DM010 or ST2000DM008 (both shingled) then it won't talk. This is what people call dead, but most of the time it is really just a queue. When reading, the pace is set based upon how the data is recorded on a shingled drive. Then the image can be retrieved without much difficulty.
During a move the drive was boxed, and now it is wanted urgently. Unfortunately, each head has welded itself to its previous resting place. Freeing the heads from their former resting places is slow work. Tapping it against a flat surface (e.g., a desk) is not a recognised method.
WD10SPZX and MQ01ABD100 units travel in bags. These bags are frequently dropped and subsequently the head stack takes the brunt of the force. A donor stack goes in first, then an unhurried clone. If you reverse that order, you can expect damage to a drive.
Relocation records accumulate within Western Digital's internal tables until a mechanically sound WD10EZEX reads at a slow speed. After clearing those records through the diagnostic port it appears that the platters have remained good throughout.
HDWD110 drives were installed in a huge number of towers built by shops and individuals. Head wear is simply the mileage catching up with them. We always save one slot on the donor rack for them.
The little amp on the arm serves all the heads. They go deaf together as soon as either age or some form of static hits, which leaves the drive looking totally dead. The only way to fix this problem is with a full donor stack.
Exos and Ultrastar stock arrives off smaller servers in the energy supply chain with high (five-figure) power-on counts. Better engineering will give you some time. It will never protect you from the inevitable, and when it happens it's going to be quick.
Fluid bearings usually are easy to diagnose. A hum when under load. Then a wobble. Then servo errors. There is a window before the wobble wins outright, and that window is when the image gets taken. Not after.
Cover taken off on the kitchen table, a thumb print laid on the upper platter, then posted in with an apologetic note attached. Often it is still winnable. Each print will have taken its share, and the honest figure only exists once the diagnostic has been performed.
Two to five hard drive platters rotate at either 5,400 or 7,200rpm. The read/write heads may be only five nanometres from the disks, on a film of moving air. It is sturdy in normal every day usage. However, it is very fragile when the head crashes onto the platter. When you call us to explain what sounds like "ticking", this is the head actuator constantly parking itself then flying back out towards its correct position, repeatedly, because the servo pattern which told it exactly where it sits no longer is readable. In doing so with each motion, it will pull a damaged head directly across the face of the disk containing your data. Thus, there is only the straightforward solution; shut it down. Leave it off. If you typed HDD Aberdeen into your phone at one in the morning, you can stop reading now and go to sleep. Nothing about the bench work is rushed. Each donor head comes out of stock, already matched, and goes in. Seized spindles are freed if bearings have failed. Finally, the read process starts. This process takes place slowly while building an initial bank of good areas first, and saving the poor areas for last. Hitachi and HGST mechanisms keep a donor shelf of their own, because Travelstar and Deskstar units are still turning in machines all over the north-east and they tend to fail without announcing anything.
Many of the dead drives we encounter do not suffer from mechanical failure. A common cause of death is an electrical surge down a rural single-phase supply, for example: this usually kills the controller board of the drive but leaves the platters intact. In order to recover that data, we need to move the original ROM (which includes the adaptive values) onto a donor PCB by hand. This cannot be done automatically as each drive has its own unique set of adaptive values. If you buy another board online and bolt it into place, it will not be able to read a single sector, and if you're unlucky it could even make things worse. Firmware is the other silent killer. When translator tables and defect lists get out of sync with the disk's current state, the disk will spin away happily and report nothing back to anyone. Shingled recording is once again a separate animal. Units like Seagate ST2000DM008, ST4000DM004 and ST1000LM048, WD Blue WD10SPZX and WD20SPZX, and Toshiba MQ04ABF100 and DT01ACA100 all record in overlapping bands. They take a long time to image, and they are not drives to hurry at all. Once past these, we are left with the usual run-of-the-mill products that most people purchase: WD Blue WD10EZEX and WD40EZAZ, WD Black and the Red Plus units taken from small servers, Seagate Barracuda and IronWolf, HGST Deskstar NAS, and the 2.5-inch Toshiba and Seagate units removed from laptops. A boxed disk posts perfectly well, so hard drive data recovery UK-wide is just part of our normal weekly workload, and any hard drive retrieval service enquiry received from outside Scotland receives the exact same treatment. Get a quote first, package it correctly, and the bench will see it the very next working day regardless of your postcode.
Worth being honest about the terms. A search for hard drive repair Aberdeen represents two entirely distinct tasks. One task is to fix the hard drive so that it works again; this cannot happen. The other task is to get the files off a dead hard drive, which generally can be done. No repairs take place here to hand drives back into use. Drives get repaired just enough to allow them to be copied once, cleanly, onto fresh media, and then they are scrapped. Any person making an offer to provide you with a mended disk to carry on using has misunderstood the job. This distinction matters when quotes are being compared. If someone is weighing up the best data recovery Aberdeen can reach, there are three questions they need to ask and then stop asking: who opens the drive and where, what donor stock is actually held, and is the price fixed in writing prior to starting work? This is the data recovery service Aberdeen posts to, and the same bench covers data recovery Scotland wide. It is a hard drive restore service Scotland reaches overnight by tracked post, whether a package starts out in Elgin, Inverurie, Stonehaven, or somewhere a good deal further south. Most Scotland hard drive repair enquiries start with a noise, and the noise is often diagnostic on its own.
The tooling decides what is possible, so how we work on all drives that are booked in with us is outlined in full below. All drives meet at least a portion of the tooling listed below. After we receive your drive, we will provide a complimentary diagnostic that will determine which section of the tooling applies to your drive; that will be done within two working days from when we received your drive:
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.
Board repair under a microscope, moving the ROM (read-only memory chip) that is located on the circuit board of your drive onto the new circuit board being installed. If you leave the ROM on the original board and do not install it on the replacement board, the board does not have the calibration information that is keeping the data intact.
The hardware includes a one-way valve that sits between your media and our equipment. From booking in to sending it home, none of our workshop's rigs are connected to write back.
Read that as an intake sheet, not a catalogue. WD10EZEX and ST1000DM010 lead it by a wide margin only because they went into more machines in this location than anything else. WD40EFPX and IronWolf ST4000VN006 members arrive from NAS boxes at homes and small offices. SkyHawk ST2000VX015 disks arrive from recorders which have written every second since installation day. ST3000DM001 keeps its notoriety topped up with a fresh casualty most months. Travelstar 5K1000 and older Deskstars arrive from loft clearances and cupboards, and they generally still read. Exos and Ultrastar stock turns up off small servers with heavy hours on the counter. WD_BLACK drives arrive from workstations doing survey and render work. Diagnosis is free and is finished two working days after the drive gets to the bench. If the drive in question has been sitting in a garage since 2005, the legacy rack still speaks IDE.
Our week is colour-coded by Western Digital: Blue stays in the family tower, Red Plus keeps the NAS company, Gold is in the rack and WD_BLACK is for gamers. Nothing reaches our bench as often as WD10EZEX drives, followed closely by WD20EZBX units and WD10SPZX drives coming from laptops. Slowly but surely, WD's problem shows itself in a sludgy service area filled with relocation records. Detection is still functional. However, speed is lost, and the drive becomes extremely sluggish. Cleaning it up using WD's own diagnostic mode will clear the sludge from the drive, at which point the platters will image as if nothing was wrong. The rest is damage from drops or bangs, fixed by installing matched donor heads like normal.
One single type of badge shows up on the booking sheet more often than all others. The shingled BarraCudas (ST1000DM010 and ST2000DM008) look like they are dead when put through heavy write loads but are actually, mostly, alive. In the same family of drives, firmware will seize, causing a mechanically sound drive to be parked at busy or to announce nothing at all, and the service terminal will lift those without ever having opened the lid. The ST3000DM001 has developed a taste for its own heads and still resides on a designated donor shelf a decade after the last unit was sold new. And finally, clicking after a knock completes the set: donors and an image taken slowly. Beyond that, we see IronWolf (ST4000VN006) members from NAS boxes, SkyHawk (ST2000VX015) disks from recorders and Exos units from small servers, each carrying many hours of operation.
Three companies owned the Deskstar and Travelstar names: IBM first, then Hitachi, then HGST under Western Digital. From each generation of these, drives are emerging from attics, office clearances, and garage shelves across the North-East. It is time to take them seriously. Not simply for the fact that their design was well done, but also for the fact that often what resides upon them exists in no other form. Their typical ending is as follows: the head stack tires surface by surface, one head after another. Errors build up on a single platter face, the read speed will slow to a crawl and eventually a "tick" will replace mounting. As such, we move from surface to surface, capturing all data that the good heads can reach, and calling on donors only for the remainder. That's why a Hitachi with intermittent errors needs a quote first, then posting to us or dropping off at our Edinburgh lab (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, no appointment needed), instead of one more attempt tonight. The most commonly received drive is the Travelstar 5K1000 from mid-2000s laptops, followed closely by 7K1000 Deskstars used in desktops during the same era. Stiction plagues both after periods of long-term storage, and neither requires any significant effort to free using the bench. Units from the Ultrastar line from smaller servers arrive with hour counts in the hundreds of thousands. Provided the seal remained intact, these units will image perfectly. Older-family spares now reside on our rack, since many are close to unobtainable.
The Deskstar and Travelstar are both names used by IBM for these ranges right up to the 2003 handover. One particular model in that range was given a nickname the industry has never quite let go of. We continue to see relics of the IDE generation show up in retired towers, most often holding the last existing copy of somebody's old accounts. Twenty years of standing still leaves nothing but a frozen spindle, dried out grease and the heads stuck to the platter. Therefore, we need to inspect any drive of that vintage before anybody applies power to it. We also have our "legacy" PATA adapters and donors in established locations on our legacy rack, and none of the old badges have been able to condemn any data that sits below them.
Before it travels, your drive has to be removed from the machine, and only the bare drive is sent. Don't know what to do? Give us a ring on 0800 689 0668 and we'll go through it with you, or take it into any computer shop and they'll have it out in ten minutes for a few pounds.
We only deal with bare drives and dismantling is not something that we do, and thus the drive must be removed from the PC, laptop or server prior to posting (a single external drive is the exception: send it whole, in its enclosure, with its cable and power supply). If it comes from a server, then remove all disks and clearly label each disk with its bay. Four screws and one connector will cover nearly all. Obtain a quote first, either via telephone or through our free online diagnostic. There are three methods in which you can send it to us: tracked and insured post, a courier service (you book this yourself), or reception at our Edinburgh location. Our address is: Edinburgh Data Recovery, 4 Redheughs Rigg, Westpoint, South Gyle, Edinburgh EH12 9DQ. We are open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, and there is no appointment needed. From Aberdeen we estimate two and a half hours (approximately 130 miles) via the A90, and tracked post arrives the next working day. Collection services are not available from anyone at our company. Your responsibility is to ensure that it reaches us. Two limitations apply to everything we do: anything soldered directly onto a motherboard is beyond what we offer (if you're not sure which kind you have, contact us prior to sending), and phones and tablets are also excluded.
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.