The drive that gets knocked onto the floor is invariably the one carrying the only copy. Portable units and mains-powered ones, every badge there is, arrive here ticking, beeping, blinking or entirely silent, and they leave as readable files on fresh media. One instruction on this page matters more than the others, and enough people get it wrong that it belongs in the opening paragraph: send the whole unit with its cable, and do not take the disk out of the case first.
Every external drive that arrives here is examined at no charge. The figure quoted afterwards is put in writing and settled before anybody reaches for a screwdriver: £300 + VAT on any one hard drive or SSD, an NVMe blade counted the same.
Logical recoveries carry no fix, no fee. The named exceptions to it are electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs; physical work takes 50% up front. The five bands are set out in full on the data recovery cost page.
Tracing a symptom back to the failure underneath it is where the real work begins, and these thirty account for all but a handful of the boxes opened at the Cambridge bench. A fault missing from the list is not an unfamiliar one — describe it on the telephone and you will get a straight view of the odds before you spend anything on postage.
The motor is trying to start and cannot. Either the spindle has seized in its bearing or the heads are resting on the platters and holding everything still. The beep is the drive giving up and retrying. Each retry costs something, so the useful response is to unplug it and stop.
Portable drives get knocked off tables more than any other storage device in the house, and they are usually running when it happens. Heads flying a few nanometres clear of a spinning platter do not survive contact. Switching it on again to see how bad it is turns a head swap into a scored surface.
Read this one before you take anything apart. On these units the encryption is done by the bridge board in the enclosure, not by the disk, and the key lives on that board. Pull the disk out and plug it into a computer and you get unreadable noise, even though the disk itself is perfect. The whole enclosure travels, with its cable.
Power is reaching the unit and no usable device is being presented. That could be the bridge chip, the cable, the power adaptor, or the disk behind all three. Establishing which of the four costs nothing here, and swapping cables at home only rules out the cheapest of them.
Three computers agreeing is worth knowing, because it moves the fault away from any one of them. What it does not tell you is whether the problem is the enclosure or the disk. Sending the unit complete, with its lead and its power supply, lets that be settled in ten minutes rather than assumed.
The partition or file system header is unreadable and Windows is proposing to replace it. Everything behind that header is where it always was. Decline, unplug, and have it read at block level, because accepting the offer is one of the few actions on this list that genuinely destroys something.
The drive has reached a region it cannot read and is retrying it for as long as anyone lets it. File copying cannot fail gracefully. Imaging hardware can, and it defers the difficult regions to the end instead of stalling the whole job on the first one.
The socket on the enclosure has worn or a solder joint has cracked. It is a repair, not a data fault, and it is a good deal easier to fix than the damage caused by a drive that keeps disconnecting mid-write. Stop using it in that state, whatever the temptation.
Desktop-sized units run on an external supply, and a failing one can deliver the wrong voltage on the way out rather than simply stopping. That takes out the bridge board and sometimes the drive's own electronics. Send the adaptor with the unit so it can be tested rather than trusted.
Silence after an impact means the heads are down on the surface, or the stack has parked somewhere it should not be. Neither is fixed by shaking, freezing, or any of the other suggestions that circulate. It is opened under filtered air and the stack is lifted clear by hand.
The drive is reaching for speed and being stopped, generally by a firmware area it cannot read or by a motor that is drawing too much current. The distinction matters and is made on the bench. Repeated power cycles at home push whichever fault it is further along.
The file system was mid-update. Files written in the last minutes are the casualties and everything older is intact. This is routine work and it is rebuilt from the structures that survive rather than from anything that has to be guessed.
Sparse bundles and APFS snapshots are more fragile than the interface suggests, and a Mac that reports a backup as corrupt is often looking at a damaged index rather than missing data. The underlying files are recovered directly from the image, which sidesteps the restore process altogether.
The partition is visible and the file system inside it is not recognised. On an external unit that regularly traces back to an interrupted write or a bridge chip that has started handing out data at the wrong offset, and neither is improved by the repair utilities at the top of a search.
Disks pulled out of external cases were often written with 4096-byte sectors presented by the bridge. Put the same disk on a plain SATA port, where it reads as 512, and every structure lands at the wrong offset. It looks exactly like corruption and it is not. The original enclosure has to be identified.
Bus-powered units live at the edge of what a USB port can supply, and a drive drawing slightly more than it should as it ages will start up and drop out. A powered hub sometimes buys a day. It does not fix anything, and a drive behaving that way is telling you to copy it off now.
The best case on this page. External drives are not trimming in the background the way an internal SSD is, so a deletion leaves the contents in place until something writes over them. Unplug it, do not use it as a scratch disk in the meantime, and most of it comes back.
Small enclosures are poor at shedding heat and a drive working hard inside one runs far above what it was rated for. Heat brings on read errors, and read errors bring on retries, which generate more heat. Anything uncomfortably warm to hold should be copied off and retired.
LaCie enclosures are common on this bench because they went into so many studios and design offices. The disk inside is a standard mechanism from one of the usual makers, and the fault is frequently the bridge or the power circuit rather than the disk. That is a cheerful diagnosis when it lands.
Several makers enable hardware encryption by default and never make it obvious. The consequence only appears when the enclosure fails, at which point the disk on its own is unreadable. It is one more reason the whole unit travels rather than the bare disk.
Changing the file system replaces the index and leaves the data underneath until something overwrites it. Recovery is carving by signature and it works well, provided nothing substantial has been copied onto the newly formatted volume in the meantime.
A drive connected at the moment an infection ran gets encrypted along with everything else, which is exactly why a permanently attached drive is not a backup. This is priced as ordinary media, 300 pounds + VAT for a single drive, and it is not forensic work and never billed as such.
The most frequent shape of the phone call rather than a fault as such. An external drive is where most households keep the only copy of everything they care about. That is worth naming plainly, because the recovery is the expensive way of solving a problem that a second drive would have prevented.
Interfaces from the mid-2000s still turn up, often out of a studio cupboard, and the adapters for them are held here. The disk inside is usually in good order. Age on its own is not a reason to write one off, and PATA-era units are still handled.
Dual-bay enclosures that were configured as a stripe fail completely when either disk goes. Both disks and the enclosure need to arrive so the layout can be worked out from the members. Arrays are priced from 500 pounds + VAT rather than as a single drive.
Temperature swings and damp are hard on both the electronics and the lubricant. A unit that has not turned for five years may have heads bonded to the platters. It gets inspected on the clean bench before it is offered power, rather than after, because one hopeful start is what turns stiction into scoring.
That is not an improvement. A drive that has stopped clicking has usually given up trying to initialise, or the heads have failed completely. The odds are still decent, but they are better on the day the clicking starts than a fortnight later.
Long scans keep a damaged drive powered and working for hours at a stretch, which is precisely the wrong treatment. Say what has been run and for how long when you book it in. It rarely rules anything out, and it always changes the order the work is done in.
Either the translator has partly collapsed, or the disk was set up with a host protected area that a bridge chip is presenting oddly. Both are read past on the bench. A drive reporting the wrong size is not a drive that has lost the difference.
Sometimes the diagnosis is the plain one. The bridge is healthy, the cable is fine, and the mechanism has failed. From there it is ordinary hard disk work at 300 pounds + VAT, with the assessment already done and the figure already in writing before anybody touches a screwdriver.
On a Western Digital My Passport or My Book, the encryption is performed by the bridge board inside the enclosure rather than by the disk, and the key lives on that board. That arrangement is invisible while the unit works and decisive the moment it stops. Pull the disk out, plug it into a computer or a caddy, and what comes back is unreadable noise with sensible-looking file names on top of it. The mechanism is in perfect health. The key has simply been left behind in an empty plastic case that is now in a bin. A fair number of these arrive after a wasted weekend spent proving exactly that. So the whole unit travels, with its cable and its power supply, and the board stays with the disk throughout. Where the board itself has failed, the key is recovered from it and the disk behind it is read normally. The wider point applies beyond one badge, because several makers enable hardware encryption by default and mention it nowhere obvious, and because half the diagnosis on any external is working out whether the enclosure or the drive stopped. That takes ten minutes with both in front of you and considerably longer without.
External drives get dropped more than any other storage in a house, and they are almost always running when it happens. Heads flying a few nanometres above a platter do not survive contact, and what follows is a rasp or a repeating tick. Switching it back on to gauge the damage is how a head replacement becomes a scored surface. A beep once a second is a different fault with the same instruction attached: the motor is trying to start and cannot, either because the spindle has seized in its bearing or because the heads are resting on the platters and holding everything still. Each retry costs something. Unplug it. Neither of those is improved by freezing the drive, tapping it on a desk or any of the other suggestions that circulate, and both are repaired properly under filtered air with a matched donor stack. What decides how much comes back is almost entirely how many times the drive was asked to try again before somebody stopped.
A single external drive is £300 + VAT, exactly as a bare disk out of a tower would be, and a portable SSD such as a Samsung T5 or T7 or a SanDisk Extreme is the same figure. The free assessment closes two working days after the unit is booked in and produces one written figure before any work starts. Two things change the band. The first is a dual-bay enclosure that was configured as a stripe, which is an array and starts at £500 + VAT because losing either disk loses the volume and both have to be imaged and reassembled. The second is chip-level work on a portable SSD where the packages have to come off the board, which takes half up front and sits outside no fix, no fee along with mechanical and electronic work. Everything else, meaning deletions, formats, damaged file systems and the drive that simply will not mount, is logical work covered by the guarantee. Old interfaces are not a problem: FireWire, eSATA and PATA-era units are still read here, and the adapters for them live on the shelf rather than being ordered when a job appears.
An external drive is two devices in one box, and half the work is deciding which of them stopped. Everything below exists to answer that question without writing to your disk, and then to do whatever the answer turns out to require.
USB 2.0 through USB-C, FireWire 400 and 800, eSATA, Thunderbolt, and the proprietary connectors two or three makers used for a season. A drive that will not talk through its own bridge frequently talks perfectly well through a matched one from the shelf.
WD My Passport and My Book units, and several other families, hold the encryption key on the bridge board. The board is kept with the disk throughout, and where the board has failed the key is recovered from it so the disk behind it can be read.
Head replacements, freeing a stack that has settled onto the surface, and platter transfers all happen under filtered air. The disk inside an external case is an ordinary mechanism and it gets the same treatment as one that arrived bare.
Per-head imaging with retry limits enforced in hardware and current draw watched throughout. A drive that hangs the file manager for twenty minutes on one bad region costs a few minutes here instead, because the difficult ground is deferred rather than fought over.
Service-mode access, translator rebuilds and modules read back out of the service area. A great many externals that appear completely dead are drives whose firmware area has silted up, and there is no consumer route into a firmware area.
Burnt regulators, shorted protection diodes and cracked tracks repaired at magnification, including the drive's own adaptive data moved across where a board has to be replaced. Electronic work takes 50% up front and sits outside no fix, no fee.
Disks written through a bridge that presented 4096-byte sectors have to be read back the same way or nothing lines up. Identifying the original bridge and reproducing its geometry is a routine first step here and a common reason a shucked disk appears corrupt when it is not.
Send the whole unit, cable and power supply included, and do not take it apart first. That advice matters most on a WD My Passport or My Book, where the encryption key sits on the bridge board rather than on the disk, so a bare disk out of one of those reads as noise no matter how healthy it is. It applies more generally too, because half the diagnosis is working out whether the enclosure or the drive stopped, and that takes minutes with both in front of you and a good deal longer without. A single external drive is 300 pounds + VAT and a portable SSD the same. A dual-bay unit configured as a stripe is an array and starts at 500 pounds + VAT. The assessment costs nothing and closes two working days after the unit is booked in. Logical faults are no fix, no fee. Mechanical and electronic work is 50% up front and sits outside the guarantee.
More external units arrive wearing this badge than any other, and they carry a trap worth understanding before you pick up a screwdriver. My Passport and My Book enclosures encrypt everything passing through them by default, with the key held on the bridge board inside the case. That is invisible while the unit works. The moment the bridge fails, or the moment somebody shucks the disk out and connects it directly, the data reads as noise. The disk is fine. The key is on the board you left behind. So the whole enclosure travels here with its cable, the board stays with the disk, and where the board itself has died the key is recovered from it. WD Elements units mostly do not encrypt, but the sensible policy is not to guess which family yours belongs to.
Seagate's external line is largely a standard mechanism in a plastic shell, which makes the diagnosis simpler than on the WD side. When one of these fails it is usually the disk rather than the bridge, and it is worked exactly as a bare drive would be. The 2.5-inch Expansion and Backup Plus units are the ones that get carried in bags and consequently the ones that get dropped, and the smaller Seagate mechanisms inside them have thin platters that take impact badly. Ticking after a fall means matched donor heads under filtered air, at 300 pounds + VAT for a single drive, with half of it payable before the work begins because the parts have to be bought for your particular disk.
LaCie sold into design, photography and video work for twenty years, so the units that reach this bench tend to be carrying somebody's livelihood rather than a photo library. The Rugged portables are the orange rubber-cased drives that live in camera bags, the d2 is the desktop tower, and the 2big is a two-bay unit that people configured as a stripe far more often than they should have. Inside them are ordinary Seagate and Toshiba mechanisms, and a fair proportion of LaCie failures turn out to be the bridge, the Thunderbolt board or the power supply rather than the disk. That is the best result available on this page, and there is a LaCie page on this site that goes through the range properly.
The Samsung T5 and T7 and the SanDisk Extreme range have quietly replaced the portable hard disk for anyone carrying work about, and they fail differently. There is nothing to drop and nothing to seize. What goes instead is the USB bridge, the controller, or in the case of one well-known family the physical join between the board and the connector, which cracks and takes the whole unit offline. The flash behind all three is generally untouched. These are read on the flash bench, priced as a single drive at 300 pounds + VAT, and where the packages have to come off the board that becomes chip-level work at 50% up front and outside no fix, no fee.
The post office does most of the work of getting a job here. A drive that is already unwell travels better boxed and insured than rattling around a car for a day of errands, and something dropped into a Leicestershire postbox this afternoon is generally logged in at Cambridge tomorrow.
The general rule is the drive travels and the machine stays behind — out of the laptop, out of the tower, out of the iMac, out of the recorder under the counter. This bench does not dismantle equipment, and a repair shop will do it while you wait. Three things are the other way round, and getting them wrong costs you the recovery: an external drive stays sealed in its own case, a NAS comes as a complete unit, and a WD My Passport or My Book travels whole with its cable, because on those the encryption key is held on the bridge board rather than on the disk — separate the two and the data becomes unreadable even to us. A Fusion Mac needs both of its drives, each labelled. The one thing nobody can work round is flash soldered onto the mainboard, as on Apple Silicon machines: if it will not come off, there is nothing to post.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Cambridge Data Recovery. It is about seventy miles from Leicester if you fancy driving it — M1 south to Junction 19, then the A14 east — and the lab is two minutes off Junction 32 with parking at the door. Posting costs you a stamp and a day instead. Whichever you choose, you hear from us the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes two working days after that.
Not certain what belongs in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape it up, or let the free online diagnostic ask the questions for you.
A shucked Passport reads as static, because the key stayed on the bridge
Bridge, cable, port or disk — ruling three out before blaming the fourth
The beeping is a stalled spindle, with a Seagate under the aluminium
LinkStation and TeraStation, and the XFS volume behind the front panel
Once the case is off, it is an ordinary disk with an ordinary fault
The examination is free, one written figure follows it, and the band covering this page is £300 + VAT on any one hard drive or SSD, an NVMe blade counted the same.