The drive with your only copy will most likely be the one that falls off the edge of the desk. Every portable and every mains powered unit from each manufacturer comes to this workbench (clicking, beeping, flashing or silent) and leaves again with your files written out in readable form on new media. LaCie is a particular speciality here, so if that's what you have it's probably best to read the following section before doing anything else.
Every external drive job is diagnosed free. The quote is written and fixed before we even pick up a tool.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Electronic, mechanical, chip-level and physical work is charged at 50% upfront. Ransomware, forensic, BitLocker and CCTV/DVR jobs are charged 100% upfront on acceptance of our fixed quotation. Please refer to the data recovery cost page for full details on costs.
The first thing we do on every external drive is match the symptom to the fault, and after twenty-odd years of doing this work, these thirty faults cover almost all of what walks in the door.
Any portable drive can end like this (heads hitting platters) and every boot-up after that is just throwing dice with whatever is left. If one time didn't work, there is no reason to try again.
When the bridge board, the drive's own electronics or the firmware fails, the disk itself stays alive but has nobody to talk for it. That's a people issue, and we have people who can address that.
When someone pulls a cable out during a write operation, it shreds the file table and you get this prompt. The files themselves are still good, and this is an offer that should be firmly declined, followed by unplugging the drive.
A spindle motor straining against stuck heads and telling you about it in Morse code through the casing. Pull the plug on it, don't make another attempt at it, and send it in.
Either the bridge has failed or the electronics of your drive have died. If imaging is possible through the original board, then that is how we do it. If not, then we do it around it, and the difference matters far more than it may seem.
WD embeds the encryption in the USB circuitry. Switch the drive into another enclosure and you'll have static filled filename listings. They all need to be moved as one unit, and here they are.
Desktop mains powered units die in the power section. Sometimes that's the cheapest fix in the building and sometimes the most fiddly. It's our free diagnostic that tells us which.
A file copy when bad sectors are spreading turns into treacle. The imaging equipment moves faster than the decline; repeatedly trying to copy from the same drive feeds it and makes the window even smaller.
On external drives deletions and formats recover well, as long as the drive is put away straight away and stays put away. Each use after that reduces its chances.
Wet winters and low lying areas send drives here each year. Platters can endure much more than their owners would ever think: cleaned, stabilised, and transplanted on the head-swap bench if the mechanism won't spin.
Thin portables made by Seagate answer a knock with clicking, and there isn't much room for anything to go right inside those small enclosures. The donor stack is always nearby.
The LaCie orange rubber does a lot more for morale than for physics. After one landing too many it is usually a standard head job in a rather smart jacket.
The micro-B ports on Toshiba's drives loosen over time from nightly use and then only make good contact when held at certain angles. The port can be reflowed, or simply bypassed during imaging.
T7s and SanDisk Extreme portable devices die electronically, with no clicking sound, as there is no mechanism inside that could click. Flash-bench cases inside external casing.
Pulling the unit out before ejecting it works until the day it won't, and then you won't be able to mount the volume. It gets put back together from one full image.
Iomega, Freecom and other similar units turn up again holding the family archives. On the inside of these units are normal mechanisms that our donor shelves covered years ago.
Someone caught the lead and took the port with it. Pads are rebuilt under magnification, or the bare drive is imaged directly if the board is beyond repair.
A number of recent 2.5 inch external hard drives use shingled media, which will slow down and drop off mid-way through a large transfer. We image at a rate that shingled recording will tolerate.
Portable drives have a shortened life span when they're being used continuously. They weren't designed to run 24/7 like NAS (Network Attached Storage) drives were.
If your upright desktop unit gets tipped flat while writing data, the heads get damaged without it ever leaving the desk. Then the heads need swapping at the head-swap bench. And none of this had anything to do with the desk.
When buying a budget portable SSD there's a good chance you're getting a cheap card wrapped inside a bridge chip and a nice enclosure. We recover what really made it onto the card; the case can go in the bin.
Sending bus power through a long cable or a hub (that doesn't have its own power supply) will brown out the drive in the middle of writing data. This happens invisibly and over and over again, and each time it adds to the damage, which is undone from a complete image.
The encryption is real, which is exactly the problem. Once the password is provided recovering data becomes relatively simple, but without it we say so straight rather than selling false hope by the hour.
Interrupted backups corrupt the bundle until restores won't work at all. The band files are repaired and the version history is searched for the versions that actually matter.
PVR boxes loop their disks the same way CCTV does, and format them in their own odd way. The programmes are carved out of a raw image, tired sectors and all.
People pull drives out of cheap external cases to save money. Some of these bare drives won't spin up in a desktop computer because of how one pin is used on the power connector. It has the exact same appearance as a dead drive, but it isn't one. Knowing this may stop someone concluding the worst.
Windows does not read Apple's file systems, so it says the disk is empty and needs to be formatted. If you click yes, it writes a new set of partitions over your existing ones. If you select no, nothing is lost and the drive works fine on the right machine.
Drives that live on the Broads, on a boat or in a workshop by the water are subject to damp air and constant low-level vibration. The vibration wears the bearings down and the damp corrodes the connectors, and both problems tend to turn up together after about three seasons.
Stand-alone duplicator docks copy from one bay to the other at the press of a button, and there is absolutely nothing preventing that button being pressed with the drives the wrong way round. A blank disk is then written over a full one. How much of the original data survives depends on how far it got before somebody noticed.
Running a repair utility on a drive that has bad sectors is a way to make things worse over time; it rewrites structures using data the utility cannot reliably read and does this for hours. Send the drive in its current state (unrepaired). Repairing a copy is much easier than undoing a repair on an original.
Portable disks are carried in camera bags all over the Lanes and in laptop sleeves on the A11, and they are placed on the edge of desks until eventually gravity decides who wins. A spinning mechanism hitting a hard floor puts the heads down onto the platters, and that is where the "click" of a dropped portable disk comes from, and why it's the most common sound heard in here. WD My Passport and Elements, Toshiba Canvio, Seagate Expansion and One Touch, Buffalo MiniStation, Iomega, LaCie: each one is simply a normal 2.5 or 3.5 inch hard drive dressed in a decorative case. Therefore every method used on the drive bench can be applied directly to them. Photographers making a living shooting Norfolk weddings and Norfolk landscapes store their entire careers on these units, so every single unit that arrives is treated as if that is exactly what it holds.
The LaCie external hard drive is one of the most commonly searched for items on this site, and possibly the least understood. Many of you have come to this website seeking help with your "beeping" LaCie external drive. The beeping from the hard drive is not an announcement of impending doom for the drive. It is simply the spindle motor attempting to start, but unable to do so due to either low power to the drive, or a seized spindle bearing, or heads that have dropped onto the platters and will not budge. There are two common reasons for these types of problems. The first reason is simple: power. A bus powered LaCie (such as a Rugged, or one of the aluminium Porsche Design mobile drives) takes all of its power from the USB port. Therefore, if the drive receives less than enough power from the USB port (due to a tired cable, an unpowered hub, or a shared port on a laptop), it may be unable to meet the minimum amount needed to start up. The second reason is mechanical: the bearing in the spindle motor has seized or the heads are sitting on top of the platters and cannot move off. In this case, a new cable will make no difference whatsoever. Repeating it does not improve the first problem either and makes the second one much worse. Working out which model you have can be done quickly and easily. The Rugged models in the orange rubber casing are designed to withstand abuse and take their power solely from the USB port. The Rugged SSD versions contain solid-state storage and do not have any moving parts, so they fail the way an SSD does instead. Porsche Design mobile drives are the brushed-aluminium portable drives that also use bus power from the USB port. Desktop units (d2, d2 Professional, 2big and the 2big Dock) get power from their own mains adapter. This means that when the power brick fails, the unit appears to die completely and can easily fool almost anybody, so it's worth ruling out before anything gets posted. Then there is the fact that matters most. A LaCie enclosure houses a perfectly ordinary Seagate or Toshiba mechanism, since LaCie has been part of Seagate for years now. Remove the outer shell of the enclosure and take out the bare disk. It is now treated like a standard hard disk: donor heads, motor work, the original ROM transplanted onto a matching circuit board, followed by a careful full copy. This is what LaCie data recovery is once the case is open, and it's why a request to repair LaCie external hard drive hardware nearly always turns into standard disk work within the first ten minutes. Furthermore, most LaCie enclosures pass the disk through without encrypting it, making them relatively easier to recover compared to the WD equivalents. However, the Secure models, or units set up with LaCie's own encryption software, will need the original credentials to go anywhere. There is now a dedicated page on this website just for LaCie (the link sits with the model list further down), covering each range (Rugged, Porsche Design, d2, 2big) separately. Whichever LaCie model you have on your desk, a single external drive is £300 + VAT once the fault has a name, and the diagnostic that names it costs nothing.
When you pull the disk from a recent WD portable and plug it directly into a plain SATA port, all you get is random "noise." This is intentional: the small USB bridge is an integral part of the encryption chain built into the drive, so the disk on its own can't be read by anything at all. A number of the more anxious calls we receive start at exactly that moment, halfway through a kitchen-table experiment. On the bench it's routine. Where the original bridge still works it does the decrypting; where it doesn't, a donor board and a rebuilt key chain take over, and your folder tree comes back looking exactly like it did when you last saw it, instead of a wall of static.
All external drives are "bare" drives wearing a costume. So the entire array of tools and techniques used in the drive workshop applies to them, and the bridge specialists back it up:
Firmware bench. Service mode is opened, translators are rebuilt, defect tables tidied, and locked firmware areas are read back out. Downloaded software cannot do any of this (and that's why so many drives are written off before they get here).
Each dying mechanism is copied head by head while monitoring the current draw throughout. Timeouts are set per sector and retries are managed through hardware. Therefore, a difficult area will take minutes to work through instead of costing the rest of the drive.
Lids are removed only on the head-swap bench and nowhere else. The gap that a head flies at is extremely narrow, which settles the argument quickly.
Jigs, combs and lifters for moving either a head stack or the entire platter pack from one chassis into another. No surfaces may ever touch each other. This rule doesn't have any exceptions and no small print.
Shelves organised by model number, firmware family and factory code, because nearly identical heads are no use. Most jobs find their donor within the building rather than waiting for one to arrive.
Self-encrypting portables (particularly WD) are imaged through their original bridge. Otherwise, the encryption chain is rebuilt so imaging can go ahead without it.
We hold our interface boards in stock and match them so that when a board is swapped, the encryption for that drive stays intact instead of being lost with the old board.
Counted by arrivals, Expansions and Passports top this list. Meanwhile, T7-class solid-state drives climb a little each quarter. There are two standing notes taken from the log. Firstly, WD places the encryption on the USB board itself, so when the bridge dies the whole chain has to be moved over rather than trying caddies in hope. Secondly, the slimmest Seagate portables answer any knock with clicking, which is because of the very limited space inside. The Iomegas and Freecoms found in drawers strip down into ordinary mechanisms already covered by our donor shelves, with an orphaned badge on the outside and a routine job on the inside.
There is nobody left at Iomega to contact. The name went to EMC, then to Lenovo, then out of use altogether, and still the drives keep coming in from all parts of Norfolk: colourful eGo portables, desktop boxes holding ten-year household archives, and Home Media units that have been untouched since the children grew up and left. Orphaned does not mean unrecoverable. Take the shell off and you will see a Samsung, Seagate or WD mechanism inside, of a type we have had spares for on these shelves since it was current. It will image just like a drive you bought this year. If you cannot open a case because it is old and difficult to take apart without damaging what's inside, don't worry about it; send the entire unit instead. Opening old cases without causing damage to the contents is a good part of this business.
LaCie built their kit with portability in mind, and that's exactly what leads to wear. It doesn't make a difference whether you have a Rugged spending time in a camera bag on the coast, or a d2 underneath an editing desk in the studio. They both get moved, and movement is bad news for a spinning platter. When you put a Rugged down hard while it is working, the heads take the beating, orange rubber or no orange rubber. The mains powered units fail differently however: they lose the interface board but the disk behind it stays healthy. Since LaCie went into Seagate, there is no manufacturer route left at all. So it goes through a workshop instead: remove the shell, image the bare disk, fit donor heads if the landing needs them, and then hand the projects back off the copy.
Treat a My Passport as a single sealed unit rather than a disk in a box. The My Passport has the USB connector built directly onto its controller board, so the hardware encryption also runs on the same piece of silicon. Therefore, if the electronics fail, the data stays locked in its original location. If you were to take the disk and put it in a spare caddy, you would get nothing but noise with file names attached. Donor boards for the WDBPKJ and WDBYVG generations are held here, and the entire encryption chain stays intact when one is fitted. It is that one step which separates a My Passport that will stay undetected for ever from one that mounts again. My Book units fail differently, usually at the power brick and then at the bridge, around a mechanism that turns out to be in good order.
The MiniStation takes the same injuries as every 2.5 inch portable (it gets dropped, the socket works loose) and sector damage shows up on its own schedule. The mains powered DriveStations usually lose their power supply and interface board before the disk itself fails, which is good news dressed as bad. There are some MiniStation models that encrypt data at hardware level. With the password to hand, that layer is opened during the work, so the data handed back looks like normal files. Regardless of the model, the process is always the same: remove the outer casing, take a complete sector by sector image of the drive, and do all recovery from just the copy.
Most items arrive at this bench by insured and tracked post. We recommend getting a quote first, either by telephone or using our free online diagnostic, and once you have received your quote, simply post the item. Post is the steadiest way to move a poorly drive, and a parcel sent from Norfolk typically arrives on the bench within a working day.
Is the drive still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR recorder? Before sending, remove the hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD), as we do not accept whole units. From a DVR or recorder, send just the disk. From a server or RAID, take out the disks and clearly label each disk by bay number. A network attached storage (NAS) device may be sent as its disks if they can be removed; otherwise please send the NAS itself. There is only one type of drive we are unable to accept: storage soldered onto a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs, extremely thin laptops). In such cases, if the storage cannot be taken out it cannot be accepted. If you are unsure whether you have a removable drive or not, call us before sending anything.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Please mark the parcel for the attention of Cambridge Data Recovery. It takes about an hour and twenty minutes to travel from Norwich along the A11, then two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32. Otherwise you can post it using a tracked service and we will receive it the following working day. We will contact you as soon as we have your drive and it is booked onto our bench.
If you're unsure of what to include in the box, please call us on 0800 689 0668 before sealing it. Or, for a first view on what we can do, you can use our free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, one fixed figure written down, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start online or ring us.