Devices · internal hard drives
The next hour counts more than the fault itself, since if a hard drive has lost its heads, motor, board or firmware, it will never repair itself when powered up again. Leave it off and get a quote first: please contact us using our phone number or via our quotation form. Then post it from Maidenhead, fully insured and tracked, to our Guildford intake laboratory. Alternatively, you may drop it off yourself at the Guildford intake laboratory (open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, no appointment needed), and we will check which of the four possible faults occurred.
Describe the fault to an engineer
0800 6890668
| The symptom | The likely cause | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| You need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it | The file system table is unreadable so Windows offers to read it as RAW or attempt a format (your files are still intact) | Remove power from it and never agree to perform the format |
| Data error (cyclic redundancy check) | The sector's checksum does not match; weak media is almost always the cause | Stop copying the data and take an image of the drive instead |
| The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error | Timing out on commands before they are completed | Turn off power and record the model number |
| Windows detected a hard disk problem | Your SMART counters have exceeded their limits | Instead of attempting to copy data take an image of the drive now |
| 0x800701E3 — a fatal device hardware error | Device lost by controller during transfer of data | Don't retry it any more; this will be bench work |
| S.M.A.R.T. Status BAD during POST | The drive has been tested by itself and failed | Stop trying to boot from the drive |
| There is 0GB listed in the BIOS setup screen, or a jumbled version of what your model should look like | The drive is unable to read its own service area, thus providing "random" responses | This is firmware work; it occurs in a laboratory setting |
Nothing is chargeable until you say yes. Every item gets a case number of its own immediately upon receipt, an engineer determines what has failed, and you get a clear picture of which files have a real possibility of being recovered. The single quote that follows is fixed, written down and does not cost anything.
First, an image of the drive is taken using a hardware imaging tool which reads around the bad spots on the drive as slowly as it needs to instead of continually pounding them. Once the copy is made, no repairs are started until that copy is held on our storage.
A replacement head assembly from a matched donor drive is installed. A seized motor is freed up, and where the board has burned out, your own drive's ROM is transferred to the donor drive's board.
All of this is performed on the copy, where your file system is then restored, and you receive the recovery list prior to being billed for any services rendered.
You don't get charged anything until you've confirmed and authorised that everything is fine after seeing the entire list of what was recovered. Any recovered items are returned via brand-new storage media and the postage costs for these are covered by us. We do not consider a project complete here until we receive confirmation that you have been able to successfully access and review every item you received back.
What percentage of your drives may fail in a year? Backblaze has gathered the only substantial public data regarding drive failure rates through their "Drive Stats", and has recorded a 1.36% annualised rate of failure for more than 344,000 datacentre drives for 2025; that number was down from 1.55% the previous year. Office & home use drives generally operate at lower duty cycles (hours), but are less likely to indicate impending failure until it actually happens.
It was two head failures. It hadn't turned for weeks. When the first imaging scan was done with a donor head stack fitted, it recovered 96%, and the ledgers, invoices and photos were all checked before the company got them back.
Rarely. It usually means the heads cannot track anymore (which does not tell us anything about the platter underneath). Most of the time when using a donor disk matching the original disk with slow speed imaging, most disks will give back most of their data. The problem is turning it on again.
Yes, in most cases. However, you should let us know exactly what was done. If a disk has been opened anywhere else, we don't even consider pricing until we have examined the disk platters. There could be contamination from opening it previously that would prevent doing this project within our standard terms & conditions, under which in most cases you only pay if we recover your data.
The cost of diagnosing is free and no fee-generating work begins until there is a number that appears in writing in front of you. A logical fault is ranked at the lowest end of the scale; jobs requiring donor components rank higher. We agree on a price before beginning any work.
Yes. We receive IDE, older versions of SATA and SAS disks most weeks; they typically only affect which adapters and imagers are used based upon how "old" the disk is.
Every additional power-up asks for even more of a drive that is already starting to fail. First open a case with us, and let the free diagnosis tell you how much remains.