Devices · disks with platters in them
Four parts of a hard disk fail: the heads, the spindle motor, the circuit board and the firmware. None of them can recover while the system keeps trying to access the disk, and it is the repeated retries that turn an imageable surface into an unreadable one. Turn the power off and keep it off, wherever the machine is in Nottingham. Working out which of the four failed is bench work and costs you nothing, and one drive is £300 + VAT, a price quoted in writing before anything chargeable happens.
Ask an engineer and the first look is free
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| What is happening | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Drive not accessible, and Windows offers to format it | The file table cannot be read and the volume shows as RAW, even though nothing written to the disk has moved | Take the power off, and refuse every format offer |
| Copying stops: Data error (cyclic redundancy check) | One sector has failed its checksum, which usually means the surface under it is failing too | Abandon the copy and image the whole disk |
| 0x8007045D: an I/O device error, and the request for that sector fails | Commands go unanswered before the timeout runs out | Shut it down and write down the full model number of the drive |
| A pop-up: Windows detected a hard disk problem | One SMART attribute has crossed its threshold | Create a complete image of the disk; do not pick individual files |
| 0x800701E3 — the device reports a hardware error | Part-way through a copy the disk falls off the bus | Retry nothing. It is bench work now |
| At boot: SMART Status BAD, Backup and Replace | The drive has already failed its own self-test | Never boot the machine off it again |
| A reported 0GB, or a model name that is just gibberish | The service area cannot be read, so the drive reports the wrong details about itself | Firmware work, and only on the bench |
Your case number is assigned when the item is received. Then an engineer works out what went wrong (no charge). At this point, you receive a basic summary of which parts are recoverable and which are not. You also receive a single written quote for the price of the recovery. Accept the quoted price or turn it down, and there is no obligation to pay anything.
Repair begins with imaging. Imaging hardware reads your disk at whatever rate the mechanism will allow, and puts off anything difficult until the end for a final try rather than grinding through it. Once the image exists, work on the real problem begins.
Donor heads are matched to your own drive. If the spindle has seized, it is freed. If the board is the fault, the ROM chip moves from the old board to the new one.
By this point your disk is out of it, and all other work is done on the image. We rebuild the file structure within the image and send you a complete list of the files recovered long before we send you a bill.
A complete file list will be provided before any invoicing. Simply say "yes" or "no" to what we found: yes means it is billed, no means it is not, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. What we find is posted to you on media purchased specifically for your case, at no additional cost to you. We consider the process complete once you have opened those files yourself on your own computer.
Just how often do hard drives really fail? There is only one substantial published set of figures: Backblaze's Drive Stats, an annualised 1.36% over some 344,000 disks through 2025, where the previous year gave 1.55%. Those drives are in server racks. Yours sits under a desk in Gainsborough or Melton Mowbray. It gets bumped. It gets unplugged during a write. It gets moved about. And no one has ever read its SMART data. Take 1.36% as the minimum.
Weeks passed with the drive sitting idle before it arrived, and two of its heads were already gone. The matched donor heads went into place and the first imaging pass came back with 96%. Ledgers, invoices and a couple of decades of family photos were copied onto new media once the owner had seen them listed.
Usually not. Clicking means a head fault, and your data isn't on the heads; it sits on the platters below. What the noise is telling you is that the heads can no longer follow their servo pattern. Once donor heads are in, the surfaces can be read slowly, and a clicking drive will usually give up the majority of what is stored on it. With each further power-up, that share goes down.
Usually, yes. Get a quote and let us know who opened it and what was done. Dust travels in ordinary room air, and once it settles on a platter the job can move past the usual terms, where in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. We don't price anything before an engineer has looked at the platters under a light.
One drive: £300 + VAT. Before that there's a free look, and the price is given in writing. Nothing costs you money until you tell us yes. A purely logical fault sits at the bottom of that band; donor parts or more engineer time push it up. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data.
IDE, older SATA and SAS turn up here most weeks. It's always the same job; only the adapters and imagers we use change with the drive's age.
The look costs nothing. It gives you a file listing of what opened and what did not, along with the cost of finishing the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Do not switch the drive on until you have that listing.