Clicking, beeping, not spinning up, or simply not detected — we recover data from failed hard drives for homes and businesses across Sheffield every week. Free diagnostic, fixed quote, and no fix, no fee.
Free diagnostic on every hard drive job. Fixed quote before any work — and no fix, no fee.
Every hard drive job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these ten cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
The read/write heads have failed and are hunting for position — the classic sound of head-stack failure.
Seized spindle motor, stiction (heads stuck to platters) or a dead PCB after a power spike.
Firmware corruption or electronics failure — the drive powers up but never announces itself.
The motor is trying to spin against stuck heads or a seized bearing — stop powering it immediately.
Degrading media surfaces; files hang, copies stall and the problem accelerates with every use.
The drive's internal map breaks (a Seagate speciality) — capacity shows as 0 or the drive hangs at busy.
Impact while spinning slaps heads into platters; even a desk-height fall can fail a drive.
Storms, cheap adapters and faulty PSUs burn the controller board — often with the drive's unique ROM on it.
The data is usually intact underneath; success depends on how much has been written since.
Drive detects but asks to be initialised or shows RAW — the index broke, not the data.
A mechanical hard drive stores your data on precision platters read by heads flying nanometres above the surface — when it fails, every extra power-on risks making things worse. Our engineers work on Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, Samsung and Hitachi drives daily, from 2.5" laptop drives to high-capacity desktop and surveillance disks. If your drive is clicking or has been dropped, switch it off and leave it off: continued attempts can scratch the platters and turn a routine recovery into a much harder one.
Head failures and clicking drives, seized spindle motors, electronics (PCB) faults after power surges, firmware corruption, bad sectors and slow unstable drives, accidental formats and deleted partitions. Donor parts are matched in-house, and imaging is done sector by sector on hardware imagers built for unstable drives.
A hard drive lab is defined by its bench. Ours runs the same professional stack on every job:
The industry-standard firmware bench — talks to drives in manufacturer service mode to repair translators, remap defects and unlock service areas.
Sector-by-sector imaging of unstable drives with per-head control, current monitoring and automatic retry strategies no software imager can match.
Filtered Class-100 airflow for open-drive work — head swaps and platter handling happen here, never on an open desk.
Precision combs and lifters for exchanging head stacks and migrating platter packs into donor chassis without contact damage.
Thousands of matched donor drives indexed by model, firmware family and site code — the right head stack or PCB is usually already on the shelf.
Micro-soldering rig for repairing surge-damaged boards and moving the drive's unique ROM chip onto a donor PCB.
Every source drive is imaged through a write-blocker, so nothing we do can alter the original media.
From current NAS and surveillance drives to twenty-year-old IDE disks out of retired PCs — if it has platters, the bench handles it.
Recovering a drive from inside a computer, laptop or server? Please take the drive out and post just the drive — we don't provide a drive-removal service, so the machine has to be opened at your end first. It's usually only a few screws. If the storage is soldered to the board, call us first on 0800 689 0668.
Most customers post or courier their device to us — it arrives next morning, and the free diagnostic starts the day it lands.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. If the storage is soldered in (e.g. Apple Silicon), call us first on 0800 689 0668.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Leeds Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.