Most of the time, when a drive stops being seen by your computer, it still holds everything that was put on it. That's generally how things go, rather than what people hope for. The hard drive recovery Norwich sends us arrives by post from across Norfolk, including Wymondham and Dereham, the Broads villages and the business units along the A11. Nobody pays anything until the fault has a name and a single fixed price is in writing in front of them.
Every hard drive job is diagnosed free. The quote follows in writing, fixed, before we take one tool off the bench.
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.
Any time we begin a hard drive job, the first thing we do is match the symptoms to the fault, and after twenty-odd years, these thirty make up almost all the jobs coming through the door.
The heads cannot find the servo marks they need, so they reset themselves and sweep across the disk surface again. This is head failure introducing itself, and each repeat is paid for in wear on the platter surface.
Either the motor has seized, the heads are parked somewhere they were never meant to park, or the drive's electronics have failed. These all produce the same silence, and only a bench test can find the cause without making things worse.
Power is applied, but no name comes back. This points to a firmware issue or the controller board rather than the platters, and although it can be fixed, it will not be done with a USB cable and a utility program.
There's no speaker inside a drive. That noise is the spindle motor straining against heads that are stuck to the surface, or a bearing that has locked up. Every retry makes it worse, so the useful thing to do is stop.
A surface error stalls the file browser and turns a copy into a slow crawl. Left powered, the count rises by the hour, so we don't leave it powered: we make an image copy and work from that copy.
The internal address map fails, and the drive either announces itself as busy or reports its capacity as zero. Seagate drives are probably the best known for this, but they're not alone. The service terminal is the way back.
Heads and platters meet at thousands of revolutions a minute, and it's all over very quickly. Switching it back on doesn't undo anything; you've simply caused more damage.
During storm season, and when cheap power supplies fail, drive boards die regularly out here, with long overhead lines across flat ground. Fixing a board with the original ROM carried over isn't rocket science; it's ordinary bench work.
A quick format leaves almost everything right where it was; a full format does not. What decides the outcome is how much has been written since, so the best thing anyone can do is stop using the drive.
The contents remain intact, even though the bookkeeping is gone. Partitions can be rebuilt with ease. The surest way of losing all your data is accepting the offer to format, so say no and do nothing else to the drive.
Each servo mark was written when the drive was made, so they can never be repaired in the field. As a run of servo marks degrades, the heads lose their position on the track and the drive goes back into reset. It reads cleanly on both sides of the damaged area, so each damaged zone is mapped and an image is made around it.
Each drive stores calibration figures unique to its own heads and preamp in a chip on the board. If you replace the board with a donor and don't move that chip across, the drive will come online and sound fine, but read nothing but noise.
Laptop drives park their heads against a plastic ramp at the edge. If a power cut catches the drive while parking, or the ramp wears down, the heads drop onto the platters instead of the ramp and stick. This repair can be done, but it is a lid-off job and very delicate.
Set by a laptop BIOS, a disk utility, or someone being careful in 2013. The drive itself is fine but entirely unreadable until the lock is dealt with at firmware level; this is a bench job, not a software fix.
Drives quietly move failing sectors to spare tracks, and there is a limited amount of room for that record. Once it's full, the drive will hang, drop offline or refuse to finish starting up. Usually the data behind it is in better shape than the drive's behaviour would suggest.
Walking pace means the drive is failing bit by bit instead of all at once. The plan is short: image it now, leave the hard areas till last, and don't ask it to do something it can no longer manage, such as copying a file.
Head stack failure made the ST3000DM001 infamous, and it still shows up here most months, usually out of a computer that hasn't been backed up since it was brand new. We have never let the donor shelf for it run dry.
Push sustained writes at a shingled drive (ST2000DM008 or ST1000DM010) and it backs up until it looks like it has died. In most cases it is simply queuing. Pace the read to suit shingled media, and there will be little drama getting the image out.
Boxed up during a house move, wanted now, and the heads are stuck to the surface where they sat. Getting them off takes some patience on the head-swap bench. It's not something you fix by banging it on the desk, whatever the internet tells you.
The heads on a WD10SPZX and an MQ01ABD100 take a beating, because these drives live in machines that get dropped. So first a donor head stack goes on at the head-swap bench, then a careful clone, in that order and never the other way round.
Western Digital stores relocation records in its internal tables, until a healthy WD10EZEX reads like treacle. We clear those records through the diagnostic port, and then find the platters were fine all along.
The HDWD110 is one of the most common choices in home-built systems, and as such it is often a head-wear patient. Its spot on the donor shelf is rarely empty for long.
One amplifier sits right on the actuator and is used by every head. When it dies through age or a static jolt, all the heads go deaf at once, which looks like total failure. The only fix is a complete donor stack.
Powering up a clicking drive to see if it has recovered will scratch arc shapes into the surface. Data on both sides of those arcs can still be imaged, but the areas where the arcs were scored are lost for good and can't be rebuilt by any lab.
Exos and Ultrastar drives come out of small servers with five-figure power-on counts. Better design just puts off the inevitable, and when it does happen, it happens fast.
Helium-sealed drives float the heads in a lighter gas. If the seal leaks, the flying height changes, error rates go up, and the drive gradually loses the ability to read itself. Image it as soon as you notice, and don't let anyone open it outside of a lab.
A failing fluid bearing starts as a hum under load, followed by wobble, followed by servo trouble. There is a window while the drive is still winning against the wobble, and this is your best chance to take the image.
Bumpers and gaskets from the early 2000s break down and leave a varnish on the heads and landing zone. This happens especially often with drives rescued from lofts and outbuildings, and it's just something our head-swap bench is used to dealing with.
If you interrupt a shingled drive while it's moving data out of its media cache, it may lose track of where each piece went: stuck at busy, or writes that were confirmed but never landed. We deal with this from a full image instead of trying to fix it on the drive itself.
Someone takes the lid off at home, puts a thumb across the top platter, and then posts it in with a 'sorry about this' note. Often there's still enough there to recover. Every fingerprint costs something, though, and the honest answer only comes after the diagnostic.
Inside are three or four glass platters spinning at high speed, with the read heads riding about five nanometres above them on a moving cushion of air. None of that is delicate in daily use, but all of it becomes delicate when a head touches down. When people describe ticking to us on the phone, it's the arm pulling back to its home position after trying to read an area where the servo pattern is no longer legible, and every attempt drags the head across the same area your photos are stored on. This is the least technical piece of advice on this website: leave it switched off. If you typed HDD Norwich into your phone at 11:30 at night, you can safely stop reading there and come back tomorrow. On the bench we work slowly: a donor head stack is matched from stock and fitted on our head-swap bench, a seized spindle bearing is freed if needed, and then a careful read banks the good areas before going anywhere near the bad ones. None of this changes the price. Any single hard drive is £300 + VAT whatever the diagnostic says, and if the problem is mechanical or electronic, half of that is paid upfront, because we need to buy parts specifically for your drive rather than generic ones. The balance is due only if we recover your data.
Many dead disks have nothing wrong with them mechanically. A surge down a rural single-phase line can blow the controller board but leave the platters completely intact. Repairing it means getting a donor PCB with the original ROM moved across by hand, not a board bought from an auction website and simply bolted on. Firmware is another silent culprit. Translator tables and defect lists stop making sense, so the disk happily keeps spinning and reports nothing to anyone. Shingled drives like the Seagate ST2000DM008 and ST2000LM007, the WD Blue WD10SPZX and the Toshiba MQ04ABF100 lay down their tracks in overlapping bands. This makes them slower to copy, and they need gentle treatment rather than rapid. Most of the hard drive recovery Norwich sends us each month is mechanical repair of this kind, and the rest is mostly partitions lost to accidental deletes or formats, plus the odd over-zealous reinstall. A boxed disk travels just fine, so this works as an HDD recovery service UK-wide: packed properly and posted from anywhere in the UK, it reaches the bench the next working day, which is how people looking for data recovery specialists end up ringing Norfolk.
In 2003 Hitachi took over IBM's disk business, ran it as HGST, and sold the entire business to Western Digital in 2012. So a drive with a Hitachi label today is a Western Digital product under an older name. There are two main lines of Hitachi hard drives we recover here. The first is the Deskstar 3.5-inch drives from towers made between 2005 and 2013, which have been stored in cupboards ever since. The second is the Travelstar 2.5-inch drives from laptops of the same time. The part numbers we see most are the HTS541010A9E680, HTS721010A9E630 and HDS721010CLA332. Both lines fail slowly. A small patch of one surface becomes unreliable, and reads across it slow right down compared with the rest of the drive. The ticking only begins once the head on that surface stops completely. That window is the opportunity: a Hitachi still reading in fits and starts is in the best condition it will ever be, and noticeably worse two weeks later. We keep donors for both lines on a shelf here rather than ordering them in, since they get harder to find every year, and anything that has sat still for a decade goes to the head-swap bench to be checked before it gets any power.
The failure modes of hard drives and SSDs are very different, so they need totally different equipment. A hard drive has platters and heads, and may need a head swap; an SSD has none of those. If an SSD fails, it will be the controller, or the firmware map showing where your files were stored on the device and how to find them again. The way back runs either through the maker's own service mode or, when that's shut, through reading the NAND chips directly and rebuilding the map in software. If the failed component is a 2.5-inch SSD, an M.2 SSD card or an NVMe SSD module instead of a disk, then our SSD data recovery page applies to your situation. It lists all of the Samsung, Crucial, Kingston and WD devices individually and explains how each of these fails. The cost is the same regardless of whether the unit arrives on our bench via the HDD path or the SSD path, i.e. £300 + VAT per single HDD or SSD, including NVMe units. Both paths also include the free diagnostic, which typically takes two working days from when we get delivery confirmation of your package. On top of the normal instructions for hard drive users, SSD users also need to know that as long as the SSD remains powered up, TRIM continues to tidy up (delete) data. Therefore, every hour the drive stays powered up is another hour spent erasing data you wish to recover.
Capability is defined by tooling, so here is all of ours. Every single hard drive that comes in goes through some part of this list, and the diagnostic that tells us which part is free and usually takes two working days from the time the drive arrives:
The firmware bench. Service mode is opened up, translators are rebuilt, defect tables are cleaned up, and locked firmware areas are read back out. The reason so many drives are written off before they even reach us is that none of this can be done with software you download.
The copy process is done head by head while monitoring the current draw. Timeouts are set per sector and retries are handled in hardware, so a stubborn area costs you minutes instead of the whole drive.
Lids only come off on the head-swap bench, and only after a diagnostic has shown that either the heads or the motor need it. We do not open anything on speculation alone.
Various combs, jigs and lifters for safely moving a head stack or a complete platter pack from one drive to another. No surface is ever allowed to touch another. This rule applies without exception or fine print.
All shelves have been organised by model number, firmware family and factory code, as a head stack that nearly matches is no use. When we are looking for parts for your job, most times they are already in the building, instead of having to wait for them to arrive from outside.
Our technician performs board-level repairs using magnified views of the boards, moving the ROM from your original drive across to transfer all your adaptive settings over to the new board. If we were to skip that step, then the new board would also lose your data.
A hardware one-way valve between our equipment and your drive. From the time it arrives until the time it leaves, there is no way at our end to write any bytes to it.
That's an intake list as opposed to a catalogue. The WD10EZEX and the ST1000DM010 appear more than any others, due to the sheer numbers that went into machines around Norwich. The WD40EFPX and IronWolf ST4000VN006 come out of home and office NAS boxes. The SkyHawk ST2000VX015 comes from recorders that have written continuously since they were fitted. We are continuing to see examples of the ST3000DM001, which keeps its legend alive with new arrivals every few months. The Travelstar 5K1000 and the old Deskstars continue to be pulled out of loft clear-outs and office drawers, where they still work. It costs nothing to diagnose these drives, and it takes two working days once the drive arrives at the bench. The legacy shelf still handles IDE, if anyone has an old drive sitting in a garage somewhere.
Western Digital gives us an easy colour chart for sorting drives by use: Blue in the family tower, Red Plus with the NAS, WD_BLACK for gaming and Gold in the rack. More than any other part number, the WD10EZEX makes its way onto this bench. It is closely followed by the WD20EZBX and the WD10SPZX (from laptops). The slow-motion WD complaint is a service area filling up with relocation records: the drive is still detected, but it runs like treacle. A clear-out through Western Digital's own diagnostic mode removes the build-up, and the drive images normally again. Otherwise it's normal knock and drop damage, which matched donor heads on the head-swap bench deal with in the usual way.
No badge has appeared on the booking sheet as often as this one. Shingled BarraCudas of the ST2000DM008 and ST1000DM010 sort put on a fairly convincing death scene under heavy writing while still alive. Firmware seizures in the same family will leave a disk's sound mechanism parked at the busy state, or simply reporting no activity, and those are fixed through the service terminal without ever opening the lid. On the other hand, the ST3000DM001, which wears out all of its own heads, has kept a designated donor shelf full for over a decade since anyone purchased it. Clicking after a knock rounds off the picture, which means the head-swap bench, donors and a slow image. What remains is mostly IronWolf ST4000VN006 members out of NAS boxes and SkyHawk ST2000VX015 disks out of recorders.
The Hitachis we get, and what they need, follow a well-established pattern. The Travelstar 5K1000 from mid-2000s laptops is by far the most common Hitachi, and the 7K1000 Deskstar from desktops of the same time is second. Years of sitting idle have caused both to suffer from stiction (the heads stick to the surface and the motor can't break them free), and on the head-swap bench both come loose without any theatrics. Units of Hitachi Ultrastar from small servers show up with hours recorded in the hundreds of thousands, and where the seals have remained intact, they image beautifully. Each Hitachi is serviced one surface at a time, taking advantage of every working head to save each area until a new donor stack is required to service the remainder. In lieu of having to order spares when needed, because ordering spare parts continues to become increasingly difficult, we keep an inventory of spares for these families on our shelves. That inventory is why a twenty-year-old Deskstar receives the same treatment as a new unit purchased this past spring.
The Deskstar and Travelstar ranges were IBM's until 2003. And as you might expect, one of those models earned a nickname that has stuck with the industry for two decades. In towers that are now nothing but retired relics, it's surprising how often you find survivors of the IDE era. They generally hold the last copy of someone's old accounts, and twenty years of doing nothing results in a seized spindle, the lubricant going hard and the heads bonding to the platters. So when a drive of this age arrives, it always goes to the head-swap bench to be checked before it gets any power. The PATA adapters and donors from back then are stacked on our legacy shelf, and so far no old badge has condemned the data underneath.
Remove the drive first and send us just the bare drive. Not sure how? Phone us on 0800 689 0668 and someone will walk you through it, or a local computer shop will do it for very little.
If the drive is screwed into a PC, laptop or server, it needs to come out first: please just send the drive, as we cannot take in full systems. Typically it's four screws and one connector. Server drives come out labelled for the bay they were in. Please contact us first to get a price, either over the telephone or through our free online diagnostic. Once you have the price, send the drive by tracked and insured post, use your preferred courier, or bring it to reception at our Cambridge location (Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD), Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, no appointment necessary. The travel time from Norwich is about an hour and twenty minutes along the A11. We do not offer a collection service, so you'll need to arrange the journey. We've got one firm limit, and we'll state it once: we can't take storage soldered to a motherboard, and we don't accept phones or tablets. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
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.