A drive the computer can no longer see is usually still holding every file you put on it. That is the ordinary outcome of this work rather than the hopeful one. Hard drive recovery Norwich sends us arrives by post from all over Norfolk — Wymondham and Dereham, the Broads villages, the units strung along the A11 — and nobody is asked for a penny until the fault has a name and a single fixed price sits in writing in front of them.
Every hard 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 hard 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 heads are hunting for servo marks they can no longer resolve, resetting, and sweeping again. It is head failure introducing itself, and every repeat performance is paid for out of the platter surface.
Either the motor has seized, the heads are resting somewhere they were never meant to rest, or the electronics have gone. One silence, three causes, and only a bench can tell them apart without making things worse.
Power goes in and no name comes back. That is the firmware area or the controller board sulking rather than the platters failing, and it is fixable — though never through a USB lead and a hopeful utility.
There is no speaker in there. That noise is the spindle motor straining against heads that are stuck to the surface, or a bearing that has locked. Each retry pulls the knot tighter, so the useful move is to stop.
Surface decay that stalls the file browser and turns a copy into a crawl. Left powered, the count climbs by the hour, so we do not leave it powered — we image it and work from the copy.
The internal address map fails and the drive either sits at busy or announces a capacity of zero. Seagate made this failure famous, but every maker manages it. The service terminal is the way back.
Heads and platters meet at several thousand revolutions a minute and the matter is decided in a fraction of a second. Switching it on again does not reopen negotiations; it just adds to the damage.
Storm season and cheap power supplies retire drive boards regularly out here on flat ground with long overhead runs. Board repair with the original ROM carried over is ordinary bench work.
A quick format leaves nearly all the data where it was; a full one 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 bookkeeping is missing while the contents sit untouched. Partition structures rebuild readily. The one reliable way to lose the lot is to accept that offer, so decline it and leave the drive alone.
Servo marks are written at the factory and cannot be replaced in the field. When a run of them degrades, the heads lose their place mid-track, the drive resets, and it reads perfectly either side of the damage. We map the bad zones and image around them.
Every drive keeps calibration figures unique to its own heads and preamp in a chip on the board. Fit a donor board without moving that chip across and the drive will spin up, sound healthy and read nothing but noise.
Laptop drives park their heads on a plastic ramp at the edge. When a power cut catches the sequence, or the ramp wears, the stack lands on the platter instead and sticks there. It is a hood job, and a delicate one.
Set by a laptop BIOS, a disk utility, or somebody being careful in 2013. The drive is healthy and completely unreadable until the lock is dealt with at firmware level, which is a bench matter rather than a software one.
Drives quietly relocate failing sectors to spare tracks, and there is a finite amount of room for that record. When it fills, the drive hangs, drops offline or refuses to complete its start-up routine. The data behind it is usually in better shape than the drive's behaviour suggests.
Answering at walking pace means it is failing in instalments rather than all at once. The plan is short: image it now, take the difficult regions last, and stop asking it to run a file copy it cannot finish.
The ST3000DM001 gave head-stack failure its reputation and still arrives here most months, usually out of a machine that has not been backed up since it was new. We have never let the donor shelf for it run dry.
Push sustained writes at a shingled ST2000DM008 or ST1000DM010 and it backs up until it appears to have died. Usually it is only queueing. Pacing the read to suit shingled media gets the image out without drama.
Boxed since a house move, wanted today, and the heads have bonded to the surface where they sat. Separating them is patient work in filtered air. It is not a job for percussion, whatever the internet suggests.
The WD10SPZX and MQ01ABD100 ride around in machines that get dropped, and the heads pay for it. Donor stack, filtered air, then a careful clone, in that order and no other.
Relocation records pile up in Western Digital's internal tables until a healthy WD10EZEX reads like treacle. Cleared through the diagnostic port, after which the platters turn out to have been fine the whole time.
The HDWD110 is the default choice in a great many self-built machines and a regular head-wear patient by consequence. Its slot on the donor shelf rarely stays empty for long.
A tiny amplifier rides on the actuator and serves every head. Age or a static jolt kills it and all the heads go deaf at once, which reads as total failure. Only a complete donor stack answers that one.
Powering up a clicking drive to see if it has recovered engraves arcs into the surface. What survives either side of those arcs still images, but the grooves themselves are gone for good and no lab can put them back.
Exos and Ultrastar units arrive off small servers carrying five-figure power-on counts on them. Better engineering delays the reckoning rather than cancelling it, and when it arrives it arrives quickly.
Sealed helium units float their heads in a lighter gas. A seal that weeps changes the fly height, the error rate climbs, and the drive gets progressively less able to read itself. Image it promptly, and let nobody open it outside a lab.
The fluid bearing gives its notice as a hum under load, then wobble, then servo trouble. There is a window while the wobble is still losing that argument, and that window is when to take the image.
Bumpers and gaskets from the early 2000s break down and coat the heads and landing zone in a varnish. It is a speciality of drives rescued from lofts and outbuildings, and the filtered bench deals with it calmly.
Interrupt a shingled drive while it is moving data out of its media cache and it can lose track of what went where: permanent busy, or writes that were acknowledged and never landed. Sorted out from a full image rather than on the drive.
Lid off at home, a thumb across the top platter, and then posted in with an apologetic note. Often still winnable. Every fingerprint takes its share, and the honest answer only comes after the diagnostic.
There are three or four glass platters in there turning at speed, with read heads riding perhaps five nanometres above them on a cushion of moving air. None of that is delicate in daily use; all of it is delicate the instant a head touches down. The ticking people describe over the phone is the arm being retracted and sent out again because the servo pattern it needs has stopped being legible, and every attempt drags the head across the same region your photographs occupy. Which produces the least technical advice on this page: leave the thing switched off. Anybody who arrived by typing HDD Norwich into a phone at half past eleven at night can safely stop reading there until morning. On the bench the pace is deliberately slow — a donor head stack matched from stock and fitted under filtered air, a seized spindle freed if the bearing has gone, then a patient read that banks the intact regions long before it goes near the awkward ones. None of that alters the figure, either: any one hard drive is £300 + VAT whatever the diagnosis turns out to say, and where the fault is mechanical or electronic half of that is taken up front, because donor parts have to be bought in for your drive rather than for drives in general.
Plenty of dead drives have nothing wrong with the mechanism at all. A surge coming down a rural single-phase supply will take the controller board out and leave the platters entirely untouched; putting that right means a donor PCB with the original ROM lifted across by hand, not a board bought off an auction site and bolted on hopefully. Firmware is the other quiet offender, with translator tables and defect lists that stop making sense, so the disk spins away happily and reports nothing to anyone. Shingled models such as the Seagate ST2000DM008 and ST2000LM007, the WD Blue WD10SPZX and the Toshiba MQ04ABF100 lay their tracks in overlapping bands, which makes them slow to copy and worth treating gently rather than briskly. Most of the hard drive recovery Norwich generates in a given month is mechanical work of that sort, with deleted partitions, accidental formats and the odd overenthusiastic reinstall making up the rest. Since a boxed disk travels perfectly well, this doubles as an HDD recovery service UK-wide: something packed properly and posted from any postcode in the country reaches the bench the following working day, which is how people hunting for data recovery specialists end up on the phone to Norfolk from counties they have never driven through.
Hitachi took on IBM's disk business in 2003, ran it as HGST, and sold the whole operation to Western Digital in 2012, so a drive wearing a Hitachi badge today is a Western Digital product under an older name. Two families account for nearly all of the Hitachi hard drive recovery done here. Deskstar 3.5-inch units come out of towers built somewhere between 2005 and 2013 that have spent the years since in a cupboard. Travelstar 2.5-inch units come out of laptops of the same period, and the part numbers that recur are the HTS541010A9E680, the HTS721010A9E630 and the HDS721010CLA332. Both families go quietly rather than dramatically. A patch of one surface turns unreliable, reads over that patch slow to a crawl while the rest of the disk behaves perfectly, and the ticking only starts once the head carrying that surface stops altogether. That gap is the whole opportunity, because a Hitachi still reading in fits and starts is at its most recoverable on the day it begins to limp and appreciably less so a fortnight later. Donors for both lines sit on a shelf here rather than being ordered in when wanted, since ordering them gets harder every year, and anything that has stood still for a decade goes to the clean bench to be looked at before it is given power at all.
A hard drive and a solid state drive fail in ways that have almost nothing in common, so they are not worked on with the same equipment. There are no platters in an SSD, no heads and no clean bench. What fails is the controller, or the firmware table recording where your files were actually written, and the way back runs either through the manufacturer's own service mode or, when that door is shut, through reading the NAND packages directly and rebuilding the translation in software. If the thing that stopped is a 2.5-inch SSD, an M.2 stick or an NVMe module rather than a spinning disk, SSD data recovery has a page of its own on this site and it is the one to read: it goes through the Samsung, Crucial, Kingston and WD models by name and what each of them does on the way out. The price is identical whichever bench the job lands on, at £300 + VAT for any one hard drive or SSD with NVMe included, and so is the free diagnostic, which takes two working days from the parcel being signed for. Solid state hard drive owners get one extra instruction that disk owners do not need: leave it unpowered. TRIM only does its tidying while the drive has power, so every hour switched on is an hour spent quietly disposing of the very thing you are trying to get back.
Capability is decided by tooling, so here is the tooling. Every hard drive that arrives goes through some part of this list, and the diagnostic that decides which part is free and takes two working days from arrival:
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.
Board-level repair under magnification, with that drive's own unique ROM carried across to any replacement board. Skip that step and the adaptive settings go with it, along with the data.
A one-way valve in hardware between our equipment and your drive. From the moment it is booked in to the moment it goes home, nothing at this end can put a byte onto it.
That is an intake list rather than a catalogue. The WD10EZEX and the ST1000DM010 turn up more than anything else because they went into so many machines around Norwich in the first place; the WD40EFPX and IronWolf ST4000VN006 climb out of home and office NAS boxes; SkyHawk ST2000VX015s come out of recorders that have been writing since the day they were fitted; and the ST3000DM001 keeps its reputation alive with a fresh example most months. The Travelstar 5K1000 and the older Deskstars arrive from loft clearances and office cupboards, and they still read. Diagnosis costs nothing and takes two working days from the day the drive reaches the bench. The legacy shelf still handles IDE, in case you were wondering about the drive in the garage.
Western Digital sorts our week out with a colour chart: Blue in the family tower, Red Plus keeping the NAS company, WD_BLACK with the gamers, Gold in the rack. No part number reaches this bench more often than the WD10EZEX, with the WD20EZBX close behind it and the WD10SPZX arriving out of laptops in much the same numbers. The slow-motion WD ailment is a service area gradually silting up with relocation records: the drive is still detected, and it has become glacial. Housekeeping through the manufacturer's own diagnostic mode clears that silt away, and the platters then image as if nothing had ever been the matter. The rest is knocks and drops, which matched donor heads and filtered air deal with in the ordinary way.
No badge appears on the booking sheet as often as this one. Shingled BarraCudas of the ST2000DM008 and ST1000DM010 sort put on a thoroughly convincing death scene under heavy writing while being, in the main, alive. Firmware seizures in the same family leave a sound mechanism parked at busy or reporting nothing whatever, and those lift through the service terminal with the lid never once coming off. The ST3000DM001, with its appetite for eating its own heads, keeps a dedicated donor shelf occupied a decade after anybody last bought one. Clicking after a knock rounds the picture out, and that means filtered air, donors and an unhurried image. What remains is mostly IronWolf ST4000VN006 members out of NAS boxes and SkyHawk ST2000VX015 disks out of recorders.
Which Hitachi arrives, and what it needs, follows a settled pattern. The Travelstar 5K1000 out of mid-2000s laptops is the most frequent by a distance, with the 7K1000 Deskstar from desktops of the same period behind it. Both are prone to stiction after years of standing still — heads bonded to the surface, a motor that will not break them free — and both come loose on the clean bench without any theatre at all. Ultrastar units off small servers turn up carrying six-figure hour counts, and where the seal has held they image beautifully. The work on any of them is done a surface at a time, banking everything the healthy heads can still reach before a donor stack is asked to take on the rest. Spares for these families are kept on the shelf here rather than ordered when they are wanted, since ordering them is steadily becoming impossible, and that stock is the reason a twenty-year-old Deskstar gets the same treatment as something bought last spring.
Until the handover in 2003 the Deskstar and Travelstar ranges were IBM's, and one model of that period picked up a nickname the industry has never entirely put down. Survivors from the IDE years keep turning up inside retired towers, generally holding the only surviving copy of somebody's old accounts. Two decades of standing still produces seized spindles, lubricant gone stiff and heads bonded to the platter, so a drive of that age goes to the clean bench to be looked at before it is given any power at all. PATA adapters and donors of the period have a settled place on the legacy shelf here, and an old badge has yet to condemn the data sitting underneath it.
Take the drive out of the machine first; only the bare drive comes to us. Not sure how? Ring 0800 689 0668 and someone will walk you through it, or a computer shop in town will do it for very little.
If the drive is still bolted inside a PC, a laptop or a server, it has to come out first, because bare drives are all we take and stripping machines is not work we do here. It is usually four screws and a plug. Post it tracked and insured, send it by your own courier, or bring it in to reception at our Cambridge location — Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, about an hour and twenty down the A11. We do not run a collection service, so the journey is yours to arrange. One hard limit, said once: storage soldered to a motherboard is beyond what we take on, and so are phones and tablets.
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.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
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.
Unsure what to put in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or run the free online diagnostic.
Diagnosis free, one figure written down, most work under no fix no fee. Start online, or ring us.