Almost nobody who searches for this wants a mended hard drive. They want a dissertation, a set of accounts, eleven years of family photographs — and repairing the disk and retrieving its contents are separate jobs with only one of them worth your money. This page sorts out the six situations the word is covering, describes what really happens on a bench and why the disk is scrap afterwards, and lists the utilities that quietly raise the bill.
Whatever is wrong with it, one disk is £300 + VAT. Spinning or solid state, NVMe included, with a free diagnostic behind the figure. Work on damaged mechanics or electronics takes half upfront and sits outside the no fix, no fee guarantee.
Repair is what people type into a search box, and it hides at least six unrelated situations. Only three of them involve a screwdriver, two need nothing done to the hardware at all, and one turns out to be a ten-pound cable. Work out which is yours.
No spin, no vibration when you rest a finger on the case, no entry in the BIOS. Suspicion falls on the circuit board underneath, where a surge tends to take out the protection components first, or on a spindle that has seized. Board and chip work is electronic, which puts it outside the guarantee with half the figure payable before it starts.
The arm carrying the read heads cannot establish where it is, so the drive retreats and tries again. Fitting a matched donor head stack in filtered air will normally coax one readable pass out of it, and one pass is the entire objective. Mechanical work, so the same 50 per cent applies and the guarantee does not.
A drive that announces itself as 0 MB, as 8 GB when it should be 4 TB, or under a manufacturer name that is not its own. The platters may be pristine. What has broken is the private management area every disk keeps for itself — address translation tables, defect lists, calibration figures — and rebuilding those is firmware work, which the guarantee does cover.
Copies that begin at a sensible speed and collapse. Explorer freezing when a particular folder is opened. Individual sectors taking whole seconds to answer, more of them each day. Nothing is replaced for this; what changes is the reading strategy, so the easy ground is captured while the disk still has hours in it.
The disk reads perfectly and the volume will not open: RAW partitions, folders full of gibberish, a format prompt, files deleted last Thursday. Not a hardware problem in any sense. It is handled on a copy, nothing is ever opened, and it is the category the guarantee was written for.
A dead USB bridge, a cracked socket, a failed mains adapter, a SATA cable that has worked loose, a laptop connector full of dust. A sizeable minority of drives posted off for repair are in perfect health and were let down by the hardware around them. The free diagnostic establishes that at no cost and says so.
Say a head stack is transplanted here. The drive is opened in filtered air, parts from a matching donor are aligned to tolerances finer than a human hair, and the whole assembly is asked to hold together for a few hours in conditions nobody could reproduce in a laptop bag. It is life support, not a service. When the imaging finishes, that disk is retired.
The same logic covers a board with the original calibration chip moved onto it, and a management area rebuilt by hand. So the product of a repair here is not a functioning disk — it is the contents of one, handed back on different media, plus a dead unit you should recycle. People find that disappointing for about a minute and then find it clarifying, because it removes the temptation to spend real money resurrecting hardware that a replacement would outperform for forty pounds.
A high-street shop advertising hard drive repair generally means it will attach the disk to a bench machine and run software against it. A recovery laboratory means donor parts, firmware tooling and imagers built for hardware that misbehaves. Both are legitimate uses of the phrase and they are nothing like each other, which is why two questions are worth asking before you hand anything over. Will a copy be taken before any repair is attempted. Will anything at all be written to my drive.
Straight answers mean careful hands. Hesitation means your disk is about to become an experiment. The distinction is not academic: repair utilities are built for a world in which the hardware is healthy and only the bookkeeping has gone astray. Aim one at a disk with tired heads or a growing list of unreadable sectors and it will spend six hours hammering precisely the regions that are struggling, then commit its conclusions to the surface you wanted preserved.
Windows disk checking is first on the list. It repairs file systems rather than disks, and its notion of repair is to force the structure into agreement with itself, which is not the same as making it correct. Entries it cannot resolve get removed; records that look wrong get shortened; loose data lands in a numbered folder as anonymous fragments. Sensible on a healthy volume after a power cut, ruinous on a disk that is physically failing. It has a page of its own here because 1,600 people a month look it up.
Then: anything advertising that it will fix bad sectors by writing to them. Full formats. Defragmenting a disk that is stalling on reads. Manufacturer utilities that offer to restore a drive to factory condition, which does exactly what it says at the expense of everything on it. And the most human tool of the lot — plugging a clicking disk back in tomorrow in case it has recovered overnight. Drives do not have good days. Each start costs surface that will not read again.
Most callers have already run something that pronounced the disk healthy or dying. Treat both verdicts as one piece of evidence among several. Two figures in that report carry real weight: the count of sectors the drive has already retired and quietly replaced from its spare pool, and the count it has failed to read but not yet condemned. If the second number is rising week on week, the disk is on its way out and that is the plainest warning you will ever get.
The catch is that this self-assessment only measures the things it was designed to measure. A head assembly degrading, a corrupted management area, a preamplifier failing — none of them appear anywhere in it, so a drive can certify itself in excellent condition and then stop answering the following morning. If the thing is clicking, stalling or vanishing from the machine, believe the symptom rather than the certificate.
The opening assessment writes nothing whatsoever. It establishes how the disk introduces itself, whether it holds a stable connection, how long it takes to respond, and what its own logs admit to. Where something physical is found, the drive moves to the clean bench and receives only the intervention needed to survive a single copying run — no more than that, because every extra minute is borrowed time.
Copying then happens on imaging hardware that expects failure mid-sentence, rather than on an ordinary PC with a USB adapter. Difficult regions are deliberately deferred so the straightforward 95 per cent is secured while the drive is still cooperating, and the awkward remainder is revisited afterwards with different tactics. From that point on, your disk is on a shelf and untouched. Partitions, file systems and folder structures are all rebuilt against the copy, which means an unsuccessful approach costs an hour of computing and nothing else.
Pricing is by category of media, not by severity of fault, so a catastrophic failure and a deleted folder on the same disk cost the same. One hard drive or SSD, NVMe included: £300 + VAT. Cards, USB sticks and pen drives: £250 + VAT. A recorder disk out of a CCTV system: £400 + VAT, which is also the figure for an encrypted volume when you can supply the key. Multi-disk storage of any kind — RAID, NAS, SAN, a server — opens at £500 + VAT and climbs with the number of members. Forensic investigation with a full written report: £800 + VAT; a forensic binary image with deleted-file extraction and no report: £400 + VAT.
Before any of that, the diagnostic, which is free and closes two working days after the drive is booked in. It produces a fixed written figure. Nothing proceeds until you accept it.
Logical faults carry the guarantee in full: no usable data returned, no invoice. Five categories sit outside it — electronic failure, mechanical failure, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs — and for those, half the quoted figure is payable before the drive is opened, because donor stock and clean-air bench time are consumed whatever the result. Note where the line falls: rebuilding a corrupted management area counts as logical and is covered, while soldering on the circuit board is not.
There is no shop counter here, so nothing gets glanced at while you wait on Gallowtree Gate or in Fosse Park. The bench is roughly 70 miles away in Cambridge: a tracked parcel gets there overnight, or you drive it — M1 south to J19, then the A14 east, about an hour and a half, with the building two minutes from Junction 32 and parking at the door. Drop-offs are taken Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. Nobody comes to collect.
One county habit is worth abandoning. Popping a poorly drive into a local computer shop for an opinion sounds prudent and frequently is not, because an opinion requires switching it on, usually more than once, sometimes with software attached. Where the fault is a corrupt file system, no harm done. Where it is mechanical, those few minutes set a ceiling on everything that follows, and it is the commonest reason a job turns up with half its recoverable data already spent.
Leave it switched off and post it in. Parts go in only as far as they must for one clean copying run, and then the drive is finished.
A padded box and a tracked label do more for a struggling disk than any amount of driving around with it. Royal Mail Special Delivery handed over in Leicester in the afternoon is generally on the Cambridge bench the following working morning, which is faster than most people manage in person.
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.