A computer that has stopped listing a drive is usually sitting next to a drive that still holds every file ever written to it. That is the ordinary outcome rather than the lucky one. Parcels reach the bench from the city centre and the Golden Mile, from the industrial units along the M1 and M69, and from Loughborough, Hinckley, Melton Mowbray and Market Harborough. Nothing is charged until the fault has a name and one fixed figure has been put in writing in front of you.
Every hard 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 actuator swings out looking for the servo pattern, finds nothing it can lock onto, resets, and repeats the whole exercise. That beat is the sound of a head that has stopped reading. Each sweep costs a little more of the coating it passes over, which makes the correct number of further power-ups zero rather than one.
Contact has been made with a surface whose outer edge is travelling at motorway speed. Coating lifts off as fine dust and that dust then behaves as grinding paste against everything it meets. Of all thirty entries on this list, this is the one where the difference between five minutes and fifty is measurable. Unplug it.
No hum, no vibration, nothing. Three entirely separate faults present themselves that way: a spindle seized in its bearing, a head stack sitting down on the platters, and a board that has stopped passing current. Each wants a different repair, and no amount of swapping cables at a kitchen table distinguishes between them.
The motor gets up to revolutions, the controller goes hunting for its firmware modules on the platters, cannot read a clean copy, and shuts everything down to limit the damage. There may be nothing at all wrong with the mechanism. The way back in is a service terminal rather than a screwdriver.
It takes power and answers when spoken to, then gives its identity as a string of nonsense characters or as nothing whatsoever. That is the firmware area speaking, not the recording surfaces. No downloadable utility has ever had a route into a firmware area, and none is about to acquire one.
The translator, the map that turns the addresses your computer asks for into physical positions on the platters, has fallen over. The drive is then answering truthfully when it says it holds nothing. Rebuild that map on the bench and the real figure comes back with everything behind it.
The surface is breaking down and the drive is quietly moving what it can onto spare tracks while it still can. Leave it in service and the decline continues. Here it comes off power, gets imaged once with the stubborn regions held back until last, and every step afterwards happens on the copy rather than the original.
The heads have arrived at a band they cannot read and the drive is retrying it, several seconds per sector, for as long as anyone is prepared to wait. File copying has no graceful way to give up. Imaging hardware does, and that single difference accounts for a large share of what a laboratory manages to save.
Platters turn at 5,400 or 7,200 revolutions a minute with the heads riding a few nanometres clear of them. A nudge is enough for contact. Powering it up afterwards to see how bad the damage is turns a head replacement into a scored surface, and there is no way back from the second of those.
Spikes off the mains, tired consumer units and cheap replacement power supplies finish off drive electronics across Leicestershire most weeks of the year. A board can be repaired, but the little serial flash carrying that drive's own calibration figures has to move across to whatever board replaces it. Electronic work takes 50% up front and sits outside no fix, no fee.
Every board carries a small suppressor across the supply rails whose only job is to short itself out when the wrong voltage arrives. It did exactly what it was designed to do. The drive now looks completely dead and the mechanism behind it has not been touched. Ten minutes with a rework iron, in hands that have done it before.
Boards carry adaptive values measured against the particular head stack and preamplifier they left the factory beside. Move the board without moving those values and you get a drive that spins beautifully and hands back noise. The calibration chip travels with the drive, or the job stops there.
A disk that has been sitting still since a house move in Wigston, or since an office cleared out its back room, comes back with the heads welded down by aged lubricant and surface tension. The motor cannot break that bond and must not be asked to try. The stack gets lifted away by hand in filtered air.
Notebook drives park their heads on a plastic ramp at the edge of the platters. Interrupt that sequence with a flat battery or a yanked cable and the stack comes to rest on the recording surface instead. Getting it off without dragging it is clean-bench work, and shaking the drive is not a substitute.
One preamplifier rides on the actuator arm and serves the whole stack. When it lets go, all the heads fall quiet together and the drive behaves as though it has none, which by then is electrically true. Nothing short of a matched donor stack, preamplifier included, answers that fault.
High-capacity units fly their heads in helium because it is thinner than air and lets the heads sit closer. A slow leak alters the flying height, error rates climb, and the drive gets measurably worse at reading itself with every month it stays in service. Image it early, and let nobody open it outside a laboratory.
Fluid dynamic bearings give notice before they seize. First a hum under load, then a wobble the servo starts working to correct, then nothing. The window in which a clean image can still be taken sits between the hum and the wobble, and it closes sooner than most owners expect it to.
That prompt means the file system header the operating system looks for first is not where it should be. It says nothing whatever about the files, which are almost certainly all still present further in. Accept the offer and a fresh empty structure gets written over the top of the old one. Decline it, unplug, and the odds stay excellent.
CHKDSK is a repair tool for a healthy disk with an untidy file system. Run it on a disk that is failing physically and it will write corrections onto weak sectors, drag the heads across damaged ground for hours, and frequently move recoverable files into found.000 as numbered fragments with no names left on them. If the drive is making any noise it should not make, do not run it.
Clone the wrong way round, or lose power halfway through, and the destination layout ends up written across the source. The user data underneath is generally intact, because a partition table occupies a few kilobytes at the very front. Rebuilding it from the file system structures further in is routine, provided nothing else has been written since.
RAW is Windows saying it can see a partition but cannot recognise the file system inside it. Behind that word sits a damaged boot sector, a corrupted master file table, or a drive returning bad reads at exactly the wrong offset. All three are worked from an image, and none of the three is improved by the repair utilities that appear at the top of a search.
Windows is offering to write a fresh signature and an empty partition scheme onto it. Say yes and you have added a second problem on top of the first. The drive being visible at all is encouraging news, because it means the electronics and the firmware area are answering. What has gone is further in and can be reconstructed.
Bare disks pulled out of external cases were often written with 4096-byte sectors by a bridge chip that presented them that way. Put the same disk on a plain SATA port and it reads as 512 and every structure lands at the wrong offset, which looks exactly like corruption and is not. The original bridge has to be identified before anything is interpreted.
Almost always a head that works cold and stops working warm, or a board component drifting out of tolerance as its temperature rises. Repeated cycles of the same behaviour make it worse. Imaging in short passes with the drive properly cooled captures far more than one long attempt ever will.
Losing mains mid-write leaves the drive with a partly updated defect list or an incomplete firmware structure, and it spends thirty seconds or more on every start trying to sort itself out. Owners tend to live with it for months. It is a warning shot, and the sensible response is a full image while the drive is still cooperating.
The F3 generation has a well-documented habit of hanging on its own firmware, and the family that followed it inherits some of the same behaviour. The mechanism underneath is usually perfect. Access is regained through the diagnostic port with the correct terminal commands for that exact firmware revision, and the revision matters more than the capacity does.
WD drives log every relocated sector into the service area, and once that list grows past a certain size the drive spends more time consulting it than reading. Files still open, eventually. The fault is not the surface but the housekeeping, and it is cleared on the bench rather than by any tool that runs under Windows.
Shingled recording overlaps the tracks like roof tiles, which raises capacity and makes rewrites expensive. On a healthy shingled disk that is invisible. On a damaged one it means every read of a weak region drags in its neighbours. Nothing is wrong with the approach, but it does mean the image takes days rather than hours, and the price does not change because of it.
A fresh installation writes a new file system over the front of the disk, and the previous one stops being addressable. The old files themselves are largely untouched further in, because an installer occupies a small fraction of the space. Recovery here is carving by content and by directory remnants, and it works well as long as nothing has been copied on since.
Workstation mirrors fail quietly. One member drops out, nobody notices, and the machine carries on writing to the other for months before that one fails as well. Now there are two versions of the data with a long gap between them. Both get imaged, both get examined, and the newest good copy of every file is assembled from the pair.
Glass platters spin at several thousand revolutions a minute and the read heads ride a cushion of moving air a few nanometres above them. Sturdy enough while they are flying, and remarkably fragile the moment one settles. The steady tick people describe on the phone is the actuator parking and sweeping out again, because the servo pattern it steers by has stopped resolving, and every sweep drags a damaged head across more of the ground your files occupy. Which makes the least technical sentence on this page the one worth acting on: cut the power and leave it off. If you have arrived here at one in the morning after searching for hdd Leicester on a phone, this can wait until after breakfast. The bench works at the opposite pace. Filtered air, a matched donor head stack fitted by hand, a seized spindle freed where the bearing has gone, then a slow read that banks the cooperative regions first and returns to the difficult ones at the end. None of that changes the figure. Whatever the diagnosis says, one hard drive is £300 + VAT, and where the failure turns out to be mechanical or electronic, half is payable before work begins, because the donor parts are bought for your particular drive rather than for drives in general.
This is the single most useful paragraph on the page for anyone whose disk is still limping along. CHKDSK is a repair tool built for a healthy disk with an untidy file system, and on that job it does exactly what it should. Point it at a disk that is failing physically and it becomes destructive: it writes corrections onto sectors that are already weak, it keeps the heads working across damaged ground for hours at a stretch, and when it cannot repair a directory entry it moves the file into found.000 as a numbered fragment with the name stripped off. People arrive here regularly with a folder full of numbered fragments and no idea which was which. The same applies to the recovery utilities that sit at the top of a search: a long scan keeps a dying drive powered and reading for hours, which is precisely the treatment it cannot take. If Windows offers to check the disk on the next restart, decline it. If the drive is ticking, scraping, or disappearing and coming back, switch the machine off and stop there.
Those two names account for more of the booking sheet than every other maker combined, which is why each has ended up with a page of its own on this site. Seagate faults fall into three groups: burnt boards needing a donor with the original calibration chip carried across, firmware and translator seizures that leave a healthy mechanism claiming to hold nothing at all, and shingled BarraCuda platters that image slowly because of how the tracks overlap. Western Digital fails elsewhere. Either the service area silts up with relocation records until a physically sound disk reads at walking pace, or a drop calls for matched donor heads under filtered air. Behind those two sit the badges that no longer exist as businesses. Maxtor went to Seagate in 2006 and the Samsung disk line followed in 2011, so a DiamondMax or a Spinpoint F3 belongs to a family nobody has made parts for in well over a decade. Hitachi is a similar story: the Deskstar and Travelstar names started at IBM, moved to Hitachi, traded as HGST and finished inside Western Digital. What that means practically is that donors are getting scarce, and an elderly drive that has begun to limp is worth sending sooner rather than later. Recovery is £300 + VAT whichever badge is on the lid.
This one catches people out more than anything else on the page, and it is worth knowing before a screwdriver comes anywhere near it. On a Western Digital My Passport or My Book, the encryption is done by the bridge board inside the enclosure rather than by the disk, and the key lives on that board. Take the disk out, put it on a SATA port, and what comes back is unreadable noise, even though the mechanism is in perfect health. The data has not been damaged. The key has simply been left behind in the empty plastic case. So the whole unit travels, with its cable, 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 same logic applies to a good number of other enclosures that encrypt in hardware without saying so on the box, which is why the safe policy is never to shuck a drive before sending it. If yours is a bare disk out of a tower or a laptop, none of this applies and the drive on its own is all that is wanted.
None of what follows is exotic for the sake of it. Each bench exists because a particular class of failure cannot be reached any other way, and between them they cover what actually arrives at Cambridge from Leicester and the county around it. Nothing here writes to your disk at any stage.
Head replacements, platter transfers and freeing a stack that has settled on the surface all happen under filtered air with the drive supported and levelled. A single airborne particle is larger than the gap the heads fly in, which is the entire reason this bench exists rather than a tidy desk.
Translator rebuilds, defect list maintenance, modules read back out of the service area, drives coaxed out of a hung boot. This is the half of the trade that has no consumer equivalent, and it is why so many drives get written off as dead before anyone with the right terminal has spoken to them.
Copies are taken one head at a time with the current draw watched throughout. Timeouts and retry limits are enforced in hardware at sector level, so an awkward band costs a few minutes of the schedule rather than the remainder of the drive.
Purpose-made tools for lifting a head stack, or a complete platter pack, out of one chassis and into another without letting anything touch a recording surface. There is no version of this job where touching one is acceptable, and there never has been.
Racked by model, firmware revision and factory code, because a head stack that is nearly right is no use to anybody. Most jobs find their match already on the shelf, which is the difference between starting on Tuesday and starting the Tuesday after next.
Burnt components lifted and replaced, damaged tracks rebuilt, and the drive's own adaptive data carried across onto whichever board goes on in place of the original. Electronic work takes 50% up front and is one of the published exclusions from no fix, no fee.
Anything your media is connected to has a blocker in front of it. From the moment the parcel is booked in to the moment it goes back out, nothing on this side of that blocker is physically capable of writing to your drive.
Treat that as a record of what arrives rather than a catalogue of what is supported. WD40EZAZ and ST4000DM004 disks sit at the top because those two went into more East Midlands desktops and budget externals than anything else of their generation. IronWolf and WD Red units come from four-bay boxes in home offices around Oadby and Loughborough. SkyHawk disks arrive out of recorders that have been writing continuously since the installer drove away, and recorder work is one of the published exclusions from no fix, no fee. Travelstars and elderly Deskstars surface during loft clearances and read perfectly well once their heads have been freed. Any single hard drive is 300 pounds + VAT, the assessment in front of it costs nothing and closes two working days after the drive is booked in, and a finished single-drive job runs two to four working days. Logical faults are no fix, no fee. Mechanical and electronic work is 50% up front. PATA is still handled, should the disk have been in a garage since 2004.
Between them these two badges account for most of what reaches the booking sheet, and each has ended up with a page of its own on this site rather than a paragraph here. Seagate drives give out in three places: the printed circuit board, the firmware translator, and shingled BarraCuda platters that image slowly because of the way the tracks overlap. The donor rack for them is organised by firmware revision rather than capacity, because on a Seagate the revision is the thing that has to match. Western Digital fails differently. Either the service area silts up with relocation records until a physically healthy disk reads at walking pace, or a drop calls for matched donor heads under filtered air. The colour on a WD label tells you where the drive spent its life: Blue in the family tower, Red in the NAS, Black in a workstation, Purple in a recorder, Gold in a rack. Either badge, one drive, 300 pounds + VAT, after an assessment that costs nothing.
There is a pattern to which Hitachi turns up and what it needs. Travelstar 7K1000 notebook drives lead comfortably, with Deskstar 7K3000 desktop disks of similar vintage behind them. Leave either standing unused for a few years and stiction sets in, the heads bonding onto the surface with the motor no longer able to break them loose. Both come apart on the clean bench without drama. Ultrastar units out of small servers arrive with hour counts in six figures, and provided the seal has held they image beautifully. Whichever family it is, the method does not change: work one surface at a time, bank whatever the healthy heads can still reach, and only then ask a donor stack to cover the rest. Spares for these lines are kept on the shelf rather than ordered when the job appears, because they get harder to find every year. That shelf is the reason a Deskstar out of 2004 gets handled exactly like a disk pulled from a machine last month.
Toshiba arrives in greater numbers than most people expect, largely because it ended up supplying the notebook trade after several rivals left it. MQ01ABD and MQ04ABF100 mechanisms shed head performance by degrees rather than all at once, so the owner notices a machine getting slower for months before anything sounds wrong. X300 desktop disks come out of self-builds and small workstations, and the later machines badged Dynabook carry the same drives under a different name on the lid. The practical point is that a Toshiba which has begun to limp is usually still readable in full on the day it starts limping and considerably less so a month later, so the value of acting early is real rather than a sales line.
Seagate absorbed Maxtor in 2006 and bought the Samsung disk business in 2011, which means a DiamondMax or a Spinpoint F3 belongs to a product line that has had no new parts made for it in well over a decade. That matters for one reason only, and it is a practical one: donors are getting scarce. A Spinpoint that limps today may be waiting on a shelf somewhere for its match, and the shelves are thinning out. Anything wearing either badge is worth sending sooner rather than later. The same goes for Fujitsu notebook disks and the Quantum Fireballs that occasionally emerge from a garage in Coalville still bolted into an IDE ribbon. No badge has yet proved old enough to write off what was recorded underneath it.
Separate the storage from the machine before you make the parcel up, since a bare drive is all that ought to arrive at Cambridge. If the screws win, telephone 0800 689 0668 and somebody will talk you through it; otherwise any repair counter in Leicester will do it for very little.
The disk has to come out of the machine before it travels, because a bare drive is the only thing taken in here and stripping computers is not part of the service. On most towers that is four screws and two plugs. Send it tracked and insured to Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD. From Leicester that is roughly seventy miles, the M1 south to Junction 19 and then the A14 east, about an hour and a half in ordinary traffic, and the lab itself sits two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32 with parking outside the door. If you would rather hand it over in person, reception takes drop-offs Monday to Friday, 9:00am to 5:30pm. A courier you book yourself is equally welcome. Nobody in this network collects and there is no Leicester counter to call at, so getting the drive to Cambridge is your half of the arrangement. Ring 0800 689 0668 inside those hours if you want the packing checked first. Two limits worth stating plainly: storage soldered onto a mainboard is outside what can be done here, and phones and tablets are not handled at all.
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.
Passport, My Book and Elements, and the key that sits on the bridge
BarraCuda, IronWolf and Backup Plus, plus the shingled-platter trap
Nothing here is mended to carry on using; a repair only buys the copy
The local view: what a Leicester disk costs and how it gets to the bench
Why running it on a failing disk destroys the files you wanted
The pointer goes, the clusters stay, and then something writes over them
What flagging a job urgent actually changes, and what it does not
Ten towns, one bench, no counter in the county and nobody collecting
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.