Clicking, beeping, not spinning up, or simply not detected: every week we recover data from failed hard drives for residential customers and for businesses in and around Sheffield. We offer a free diagnostic, along with a fixed price quotation in writing before any work is undertaken.
Free diagnostic on every hard drive job. A fixed price quotation in writing before any work is undertaken.
On most jobs, you only pay if we recover your data. For electronic, mechanical and chip-level work, we'll take half up front and the rest only if we're able to recover your data. Jobs involving BitLocker, ransomware, forensic or CCTV/DVR work are paid upfront once you accept the fixed quote. Complete pricing can be found on the data recovery cost page.
Every hard disk recovery job begins by matching the symptoms to the fault, and these ten symptoms cover nearly all of the jobs that reach our bench.
The read/write heads have failed and are hunting for position, the classic sound of head-stack failure.
A seized spindle motor, heads stuck to the platters (stiction), or a dead printed circuit board after a power surge.
Corruption of firmware or electronics failure: the drive powers up but never announces itself.
The drive's motor is attempting to rotate against stuck heads or a seized bearing, so stop powering the drive immediately.
Degradation of media surfaces: files hang, copying stalls, and the problems accelerate with each use.
Breakage of the internal map (a Seagate speciality): reported capacity displays as 0, or the drive appears to hang at busy.
An impact while the drive is spinning causes the heads to crash into the platters; even a desk-height drop can result in a drive failure.
Storms, cheap adapters and faulty PSUs destroy the controller board, which frequently carries the drive's unique ROM chip.
Usually the data remains intact beneath, and success depends upon how much has been written since.
The drive detects but asks to be initialised or reports RAW: the index has broken, not the data.
Mechanical hard disk drives store your data on precision platters read by heads flying nanometres above the surface, and when one fails, each additional power-on increases the risk of making things worse. Our engineers work on Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, Samsung and Hitachi drives on a daily basis, from 2.5" laptop disks right through to high-capacity desktop and surveillance drives. If your disk is clicking or has been dropped, switch it off and leave it off: continued attempts can scratch the platters and turn what could have been a routine recovery into a much harder job.
Failed heads and clicking disks, seized spindle motors, electronic (PCB) failures due to power surges, firmware corruption, bad sectors and slow unstable disks, accidental formats and deleted partitions. Donor parts are matched in-house, and sector-by-sector imaging is performed using hardware imagers designed for unstable drives. If you have been searching for a hard drive retrieval service, this is it: careful lab-grade data recovery from disks that software tools cannot safely touch.
A hard disk lab is defined by its bench. Our bench runs the same professional stack on every job:
This is the industry-standard firmware bench: it communicates with drives in manufacturer service mode in order to repair translators, remap defective sectors and unlock service areas.
Sector-by-sector imaging of unstable drives, using per-head control, current monitoring and automatic retry strategies that no software-based imager can match.
Our dedicated head-swap bench for open-drive work: all head swaps and platter handling take place here, never on an open desk.
Precision combs and lifters, used to exchange head stacks and migrate platter packs into donor chassis without causing contact damage.
Thousands of matched donor drives, indexed by model number, firmware family and site code, so when a faulty head stack or PCB needs replacing, the correct unit is typically already on the shelf.
A micro-soldering rig for repairing surge-damaged boards and moving the drive's unique ROM chip onto a donor PCB.
All source drives are imaged through a write-blocker, to ensure nothing we do can modify the original media.
From current NAS and surveillance drives through to twenty-year-old IDE drives out of retired PCs, if it has platters, the bench handles it.
WD's colour-coded families (Blue in family desktops, Black in performance builds, Red in NAS bays) share one signature ageing fault: the service area, the drive's private firmware zone, silts up with relocation records over time until the drive responds to the computer very slowly or not at all. That slow state looks terminal but rarely is: the bench talks to the drive in manufacturer service mode, tidies the firmware, and the platters then image normally. Dropped and knocked WDs are another type of job, a donor head swap on the head-swap bench, and both types arrive in numbers each month.
Barracudas have a well-known set of firmware traps (drives which hang at 'busy', report zero capacity, or vanish from the BIOS while remaining mechanically perfect), and these states are picked apart through the drive's diagnostic port without ever opening the case. A Barracuda which starts clicking following a knock or a fall is the other Seagate classic: failed heads, which means matched donor parts on the head-swap bench before any imaging begins. Between firmware states and head damage, Seagate is the most frequently encountered badge on this bench.
Deskstar and Travelstar disks passed from IBM to Hitachi in 2003 and later became WD's HGST line, and drives from all three badge eras still arrive weekly from desktops and laptops built across two decades. Their signature fault is a tiring head stack: reads slow down, one platter surface starts failing ahead of the others, and eventually the drive ticks instead of mounting. Recovery runs surface by surface: the healthy heads secure their platters first, then a matched donor stack from our library goes in to read whatever the weak head left behind.
Before the acquisition of this product line by Hitachi, Deskstar and Travelstar were IBM products, and older IDE-era models continue to turn up in retired towers and laptops stored away in lofts throughout Sheffield, containing the last copies of old account information and photo archives. These drives have been inactive for many years and have their own unique failure mechanisms (seized bearings, sticky spindle lubricant and heads stuck to the platters), so they go on the repair bench before they are ever turned back on. Our legacy shelf contains PATA adapters and other donor parts from the same era, so an IBM sticker alone is never adequate justification to declare the data lost forever.
Prior to posting your drive to us, please obtain a quote via our complimentary online diagnostic tool or over the phone. After obtaining a quote, carefully remove the drive from your computer and post the drive to us. Uncertain how to do this? Ring 0800 689 0668 for assistance, or have your local computer repair shop remove the drive for a small fee.
Do you want to recover a drive from a desktop PC, laptop or server? First obtain a quote over the phone at 0800 689 0668 or through our complimentary online diagnostic. Then remove the drive and post us just the drive. We cannot remove your drive for you, so your computer must be opened at your end first. Typically only a few screws need to be removed. However, if the storage is soldered to the motherboard, we will not perform a recovery: we only recover drives that can be removed and sent to us. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
Customers get a quote before sending their media to us, either by telephone on 0800 689 0668 or by completing our free online diagnostic. Once a customer has their quote, they post their media to us, tracked and insured.
Are you sending a drive from a PC, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV/DVR or server? Please just send the drive itself (hard disk or SSD) and not the entire unit, as we do not offer a drive removal service. If you have a RAID or server system, please send all the disks, each one labelled by its bay. Data recovery from storage that has been soldered onto the motherboard is not possible (for example Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops), therefore we require removable drives. If you are unsure whether you have removable drives, please call us before sending anything.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
The package should be marked for the attention of Leeds Data Recovery, and we will call you as soon as the diagnosis has been completed.
Not sure what to send? Please call us first on 0800 689 0668 or complete our free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote and, in most cases, you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.