The drive holding the only copy is reliably the one that goes off the edge of the desk. Portables and mains-powered units of every make reach this bench — clicking, beeping, flashing or entirely silent — and leave again as readable files on fresh media. LaCie is a particular speciality here, and if that is what you have, the section below is worth reading before you do anything else at all.
Every external drive job is diagnosed free. The quote follows in writing, fixed, before a screwdriver is picked up.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
The first job on any external drive is matching the symptom to the fault — and after twenty-odd years, these thirty account for very nearly everything that comes through the door.
The portable drive's signature ending: heads into platters, and each further power-up gambles with whatever is left. There is nothing to be gained by trying it once more.
The bridge board, the drive's own electronics or the firmware has gone, while the disk inside stays perfectly alive with nobody to interpret for it. That is a staffing problem, and we can staff it.
A cable pulled mid-write shreds the file table and produces that prompt. The files behind it are fine, and the offer deserves a firm refusal followed by unplugging the drive.
A spindle motor straining against stuck heads, announced in morse code through the enclosure. Unplug it, resist the second attempt, and send it in.
Bridge failure or dead drive electronics. Imaging happens through the original board where that is possible, and around it where it is not, and the difference matters more than it sounds.
WD builds the encryption into the USB board itself. Swap the drive into a hopeful caddy and you get static wearing filenames. The whole chain has to move across together, and here it does.
Mains-powered desktop units fail at the power stage, which is sometimes the cheapest repair in the building and sometimes the fiddliest. The free diagnostic is what tells us which.
Bad sectors on the march turn a file copy into treacle. Imaging hardware outruns the decline; repeated hopeful copying feeds it and shortens the time available.
Deletions and formats on externals recover well, on the strict condition that the drive is parked immediately and stays parked. Every subsequent use is a subtraction.
Low ground and a wet winter deliver drives here every year. Platters withstand a great deal more than owners dare hope: cleaned, stabilised, and transplanted in filtered air if the mechanism will not turn.
Seagate's slimmest portables answer a knock with clockwork clicking, and there is very little room inside them for anything to go right. Donor stacks live within arm's reach.
LaCie's orange rubber does more for morale than for physics. One landing too many and it is a standard head job in an unusually smart jacket.
Toshiba's micro-B port works loose after years of nightly duty and then makes contact only at certain angles. Reflowed, or else bypassed altogether while the imaging runs.
T7s and SanDisk Extreme portables exit electronically, without any click at all, since there is nothing inside them that could click. Flash-bench cases in an external's clothing.
Yanking it out without ejecting works right up until the day it does not, and then the volume refuses to mount at all. Reassembled from one complete capture.
Iomega, Freecom and their contemporaries resurface bearing the family archive. Inside are ordinary mechanisms that our donor shelves covered years ago.
Somebody caught the lead and took the port away with it. Pads are rebuilt under magnification, or the bare drive is imaged directly if the board is past helping.
Many newer 2.5-inch externals use shingled media, which stalls and drops off partway through a large copy. Imaged at a pace shingled recording will actually tolerate.
A portable drive running around the clock wears out years early, because that is not what it was built for. Continuous duty is what NAS drives exist to do.
Upright desktop units tipped flat mid-write collect head damage without ever leaving the desk. Filtered-air work follows, and the desk is entirely innocent.
Some bargain portable SSDs are one cheap card behind a bridge chip and a nicely finished case. We recover what genuinely landed on the card; the case goes in the bin.
Bus power through a long lead or a hub without its own supply browns the drive out mid-write, repeatedly and invisibly. The damage accumulates and is undone from a complete image.
That encryption is genuine, which is exactly the difficulty. With the password it is routine work; without it we say so straight rather than selling optimism by the hour.
Interrupted backups corrupt the bundle until restores refuse outright. The band files get mended and the history mined for the versions that actually matter.
PVR boxes loop their disks the way CCTV does, and format them in their own peculiar fashion. The programmes carve out of a raw image, tired sectors and all.
People take drives out of cheap external cases to save money, and some of those bare drives will not spin in a PC because of how one pin on the power connector is used. It looks exactly like a dead drive and is not one. Worth knowing before anyone concludes the worst.
Windows does not read Apple's file systems and reports the disk as empty and unformatted, complete with a helpful offer. Accepting it writes a new partition structure over a perfectly good one. Declining it costs nothing, and the drive reads normally on the right machine.
Drives that live on the Broads, on a boat or in a workshop by the water, take on damp air and constant low-level vibration. The vibration wears the bearings and the damp corrodes the connectors, and the two arrive together after about three seasons.
Standalone duplicator docks copy from one bay to the other at the press of a button, and there is nothing to stop that button being pressed with the drives the wrong way round. A blank disk gets written over a full one. What survives depends entirely on how far it got before somebody noticed.
Running a repair utility at a drive with bad sectors is a slow-motion way of making things worse: it rewrites structures using data it cannot reliably read, and it does so for hours. Send it as it is, unrepaired. Repairs are far easier to perform on a copy than to undo on an original.
Portable drives live in camera bags around the Lanes, in laptop sleeves on the A11, and balanced on the edge of desks until gravity settles the argument. A spinning mechanism meeting a hard floor puts the heads down, which is where the click after a drop comes from and why it is the most familiar sound in the place. WD My Passport and Elements, Toshiba Canvio, Seagate Expansion and One Touch, Buffalo MiniStation, Iomega, LaCie: each one is an ordinary 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch disk wearing a decorative shell, which means every technique on the drive bench applies to them unchanged. Photographers earning a living from Norfolk weddings and Norfolk landscapes keep whole careers on these things, and each unit that turns up is handled on the assumption that this is precisely what it is.
LaCie earns a section of its own, partly because so many people arrive here searching for it and partly because the symptoms get misread so consistently. Take the commonest one first. A LaCie hard drive beeping is not the unit announcing its own death; it is the spindle motor attempting to start and stalling, with the beep being that attempt repeating itself once a second. Two ordinary causes account for nearly all of it. The first is power. A bus-powered 2.5-inch unit such as a Rugged, or one of the aluminium Porsche Design mobile drives, takes everything it needs from the USB port, and a tired cable, an unpowered hub or a shared port on a laptop will leave it just short of what starting requires. The second is mechanical: a spindle bearing that has seized, or heads that settled onto the platter surface and stuck there, neither of which is solved by a different cable. Repetition makes the first cause no better and the second considerably worse. Placing the range is easy enough. The Rugged models in the orange rubber bumper are bus-powered and built for exactly the treatment they get; the Rugged SSD versions have nothing moving inside and fail in the manner of an SSD instead. Porsche Design mobile drives are the plain brushed-aluminium ones, also bus-powered. The desktop units — d2, d2 Professional, 2big and the 2big Dock — run from their own mains supply, and a failed power brick impersonates a dead drive convincingly enough to fool almost anybody, which is worth ruling out before anything gets posted. Then comes the fact that governs the whole job. A LaCie enclosure contains a perfectly ordinary Seagate or Toshiba mechanism, LaCie having been part of Seagate for years now. Off comes the shell, out comes the bare disk, and it is treated as the drive it always was: donor heads, motor work, a matched board with the original ROM transplanted onto it, then a careful full copy. That is what LaCie data recovery consists of once the case is open, and it is why a request to repair LaCie external hard drive hardware nearly always turns into standard disk work within the first ten minutes. Most LaCie enclosures pass the disk through without encrypting it, which makes them noticeably more straightforward than the WD equivalents; the exceptions are the Secure models and any unit configured with LaCie's own encryption software, and those need the original credentials to go anywhere. There is now a page on this site given over to LaCie alone, taking the Rugged, Porsche Design, d2 and 2big ranges one at a time — the link to it sits with the model list further down. Whichever of them is on your desk, a single external drive is £300 + VAT once the fault has a name, and the diagnostic that names it costs nothing.
Pull the disk out of a recent WD portable, wire it to a plain SATA port, and what appears is noise. That is deliberate: that small USB bridge forms part of the encryption chain built into the drive, so the disk on its own is unreadable to anything at all. A fair proportion of the more anxious calls taken here begin at precisely that moment, halfway through a kitchen-table experiment. On the bench it is unremarkable. Where the original bridge still works it does the decrypting; where it does not, a donor board and a rebuilt key chain take over the job, and what comes back is your folder tree exactly as you left it instead of a wall of static.
Every external is a bare drive in a costume, so the whole drive workshop applies, and the bridge specialists back it up:
The firmware bench. Service mode opens, translators are rebuilt, defect tables tidied, locked firmware areas read back out. None of that is available to software you can download, which is why so many drives are written off before they get here.
A dying mechanism is copied head by head with the current draw watched throughout. Timeouts are set per sector and retries handled in hardware, so a stubborn area costs minutes rather than the rest of the drive.
Lids come off inside filtered air and nowhere else. A speck of ordinary room dust is larger than the gap a head flies at, which settles the argument neatly.
Combs, jigs and lifters for moving a head stack, or a whole platter pack, from one chassis into another. Surfaces are never allowed to touch one another. That rule has no exceptions and no small print.
Shelves sorted by model, firmware family and factory code, because a head stack that nearly matches is no use at all. Most jobs find their donor in the building rather than waiting on one.
Self-encrypting portables, WD's in particular, are imaged through their original bridge — or the encryption chain is rebuilt so that imaging can go ahead without it.
Interface boards held on our own shelves and matched so that a drive's encryption survives the swap intact rather than being lost with the old board.
Counted by arrivals, Expansions and Passports head the table here, and T7-class solid state climbs a little every quarter. Two standing notes from the log. First, WD puts its encryption on the USB board itself, so a dead bridge means moving the whole chain over rather than trying caddies in hope. Second, the slimmest Seagate portables answer any knock with clicking, which follows from how little room there is inside one. The Iomegas and Freecoms found in drawers undress into ordinary mechanisms already covered by our donor shelves — an orphaned badge on the outside and a routine job on the inside.
There is nobody left at Iomega to ring. The name went to EMC, then to Lenovo, then out of use altogether, and still the drives keep appearing from drawers all over Norfolk: brightly coloured eGo portables, desktop boxes that did ten years as the household archive, Home Media units nobody has touched since the family grew up and left. Orphaned is not the same word as unrecoverable. Take the shell off and you find a Samsung, Seagate or WD mechanism of a type these shelves have carried spares for since it was current, and it images by the route a drive bought this year would take. Where an old case refuses to come apart, send the whole thing in; opening awkward legacy enclosures without harming what is inside them is a good part of this trade.
LaCie built its kit for people who carry things about, which is precisely what wears it out. A Rugged that spends its life in a camera bag on the coast, a d2 sitting under an edit desk in a studio: both get moved, and movement is the enemy of a turning platter. Put a Rugged down hard while it is running and the heads pay for it, orange rubber or no orange rubber. The mains-powered ranges fail along a different line, losing an interface board while the disk behind it stays in fine health. Since the brand went into Seagate there is no manufacturer route left at all, so it runs through a workshop instead: shell off, bare disk imaged, donor heads fitted if the landing demands them, and the projects handed back off the copy.
Treat a My Passport as a single sealed instrument rather than a disk in a box. Its USB socket sits directly on the drive's own controller board, and the hardware encryption runs in that same silicon. If the electronics die, the files stay locked exactly where they are, and dropping the bare disk into a spare caddy gets you noise with filenames attached. Donor boards covering the WDBPKJ and WDBYVG generations are held here, and the encryption chain goes across intact when one is fitted. That single step is what separates a Passport that stays undetected for ever from one that mounts again. My Book units fail along quite another line, usually at the power brick and then at the bridge, around a mechanism that turns out to be in excellent order.
A MiniStation collects the injuries every 2.5-inch portable collects: it gets dropped, its socket works loose, and sector damage turns up on a timetable of its own. The mains-powered DriveStation range tends to outlive its power supply and its interface board rather than its disk, which is good news dressed as bad. Several MiniStation variants encrypt in hardware, and with the password to hand that layer is opened during the work, so what is handed back reads as ordinary files. The running order is identical whatever the model: shell off, complete sector image, and recovery carried out on nothing but the copy.
Most of what reaches this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the steadiest way to move a poorly drive, and a parcel posted in Norfolk is usually on the bench the next working day.
Is the drive still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR recorder? The hard drive or SSD needs to come out first, and only the bare drive travels — taking drives out of machines is not something we do here. Storage soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, one or two very thin laptops) is the single thing beyond us: if it will not come out, it cannot come in.
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Mark the parcel for the attention of Cambridge Data Recovery. From Norwich it is about an hour and twenty down the A11, then two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32 — or next working day by tracked post. You hear from us as soon as it is booked onto the bench.
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