Drive repair · what mends, and what is finished
One drive, £300 + VAT — a single figure, put in writing, after a diagnosis you pay nothing for. Two jobs go by the same name and the money buys the second: one job mends hardware, the other lifts the contents off, and files only ever come back from the second. Electronics come back. Firmware comes back. Platters, motors and head stacks do not; they are kept alive for a single pass over the surfaces and then retired. Drives arrive here from Nottingham, Beeston, Worksop, Ilkeston and Melton Mowbray, and each of them ends up in the same place — your files, on media bought new for the job.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| It clicks, or it ticks. Is that mendable? | A head crash. The stack is finished, and donor heads will hold for one sweep of the surfaces and no longer | Recovery work, not repair work |
| Silent — no light, no sound, nothing | Nearly always the board: a TVS diode shorted across, or electronics that have given out. A true repair, this one | Board repaired, then cloned |
| It shows 0GB, or answers to somebody else's model name | Corruption in the translator or a service-area module. That is firmware, and firmware mends | Firmware put right, then imaged |
| A portable's USB socket has broken off the board | A socket and bridge-board job — and where the portable is a WD, its encryption keys are inside that bridge chip | Post it complete, enclosure included |
| A repair shop says it is now 'working' | Ask exactly which part was changed. A blank disk fitted where yours used to be gives you back nothing | Ask before any money changes hands |
| Is a second-hand board off eBay cheaper? | Adaptives in its ROM belong to somebody else's mechanism, so a donor fitted straight from the packet reads noise | Your ROM must be transferred over |
Your device picks up a case number the day it arrives, and an engineer then establishes what has genuinely gone wrong — at no cost, and ahead of everything else. Two things come back to you together: a plain account of what can be lifted and what cannot, and one fixed figure in writing. Agree to that figure, or turn it down and pay nothing.
Electronics, firmware, or the mechanism turning inside — three unrelated things stop a disk, and all three answer to the phrase broken hard drive. Which is why quotes against one symptom can differ by hundreds of pounds. Settling which of the three you are holding is what the free diagnosis does, before any money is discussed.
Your ROM goes onto a rebuilt board. Damaged service-area modules get corrected one at a time. Where an original mechanical part has given out, a donor part takes its place. Each of those steps exists for a single end: one pass over the surfaces, start to finish, without a break.
Anything lifted off is verified, listed, and written onto media bought in new for your job. Holding it was all the drive was ever doing. If light duty is left in the thing, you will be told so; if the mechanism is done for, you will be told that.
The file list reaches you before any invoice does. Say yes and it is billed; say no and it is not — and on most jobs, if nothing comes back there is nothing to pay. Whatever comes off goes home on media bought in for your case, carriage at our end. Nothing here is closed until you have opened those files on your own machine.
Set down here, and stuck to: electronics come back and firmware comes back, both of them ordinary repairs. Mechanical parts stay alive for one copy and no longer. Where the coating on a platter has been scored through, nothing returns — not here and not anywhere, whatever the advertising claims. None of that has moved in years, and Seagate, Toshiba, Western Digital and Hitachi badges keep reaching us from Nottingham, Chesterfield, Newark-on-Trent and Grantham. One drive costs £300 + VAT, fixed in writing once the free look is finished, and where nothing is recovered there is no fee on most jobs. Should a firm offer to hand the failed drive itself back to you fit for daily use, read the offer against that firm's own small print, and see how much of it survives.
A shop fitted a new disk and gave the laptop back empty. The old drive went into a drawer at a surveying practice in Grantham and sat there ticking for a fortnight. It came here, took a donor head stack, and inside two days the measured surveys and the site photography were sitting on the shop's new disk.
Partly, yes. Electronics come back, and firmware comes back with them: a rebuilt PCB carrying the ROM off your own board, plus a service area put right module by module. Anything mechanical is a different proposition. A donor head stack goes in for one purpose only, which is staying alive long enough to read the platters once, and it is retired when that read ends. The data travels home to you. The drive itself stays here.
Hardware you can carry on using is what a repair leaves you holding. What recovery leaves you is the files, the hardware being written off. Of a drive that has genuinely failed, only one of those answers is honest; the other is why a laptop can return from a cheap fix, running beautifully, with not a scrap of its owner's work on it. Nothing was mended there. A disk was swapped.
Seldom, and never by itself. A board's ROM stores adaptive values measured against one mechanism and against nothing else. Move that chip over and the drive begins answering sensibly; leave a donor board exactly as it came and what the heads hand you is noise. Moving it means desoldering, which means a bench equipped for the job.
Because a disk is not what the money buys. £300 + VAT covers getting the contents of the drive that stopped back to you on media that works: a single figure, put in writing once the free diagnosis is finished, with no fee on most jobs if nothing is recovered. Money spent instead on coaxing a failed mechanism along leaves you owning a component you would never dare rely on.
The look costs nothing. What comes back to you is a file list — what opened, what did not — plus one figure to finish the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. Most jobs carry no fee at all unless the data comes back. Leave the drive switched off until you have that list.