Devices · internal hard drives
What happens in the next hour counts for more than the fault itself, because a disk that has lost its heads, its motor, its board or its firmware will not mend itself by being switched on. Leave it off, post it in from Maidenhead, and let the bench find which of the four it is.
Describe the fault to an engineer
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| The symptom | The likely cause | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| You need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it | The file table is unreadable, so Windows offers RAW and a format; the files remain | Unplug it, and never accept the format |
| Data error (cyclic redundancy check) | The checksum on a sector did not match, and weak media is the usual reason | End the copy; image the disk instead |
| The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error | Commands are timing out before they complete | Power it down; note the model number |
| Windows detected a hard disk problem | SMART counters have crossed their limits | Take an image today rather than a copy |
| 0x800701E3 — a fatal device hardware error | The controller loses the device while data is moving | No more retries; this is bench work |
| S.M.A.R.T. Status BAD during POST | The disk has failed its own self-test | Stop booting the machine from it |
| 0GB in the BIOS, or a garbled model string | The disk cannot read its own service area, so it reports nonsense | Firmware work, in the lab |
Nothing becomes chargeable until you have said yes to it. Each item takes a case number of its own the moment it arrives, an engineer establishes what has actually failed, and you are given a candid view of which files stand a realistic chance of returning. The single quote that follows is fixed, written down, and costs nothing.
A hardware imager takes the drive first, reading round the weak areas at its own pace instead of hammering them, and no repair work begins until that copy sits on our storage.
A matched donor supplies the head stack, a seized motor is released, and where the board has burnt out your own drive's ROM is transplanted onto it.
All of it is done on the copy, where the file system is put back together and the recovered list reaches you before anything is charged.
Nothing is billed until you have seen the recovered file list in full and told us to go ahead. What comes back arrives on new media, with the return journey at our cost, and the case stays open at this end until you have opened every file yourself.
How likely is a drive to fail in a year? The one substantial public dataset is Backblaze's Drive Stats, and for 2025 it records 1.36% annualised across more than 344,000 datacentre disks, down from 1.55% the year before. Domestic and office drives run gentler hours, though when they do fail they tend to announce it much later.
Two heads had failed, and nothing inside had turned in weeks. With a donor head stack fitted, the first imaging pass took 96% off, and the ledgers, invoices and photographs all went back checked.
Seldom. The noise reports that the heads can no longer track, which says nothing about the platters beneath them. With a matched donor stack and unhurried, low-speed imaging, most of these drives give up most of their contents. What harms them is being switched on again.
In most cases yes, provided you say exactly what was done. Once a drive has been opened outside clean conditions, no price is given until the platters have been examined, and contamination may take the job outside no-recovery-no-fee.
The diagnosis costs nothing, and no chargeable work starts until a written figure sits in front of you. A logical fault sits at the bottom of the range; a job needing donor parts and clean-air work sits higher. The price is agreed first.
Yes. IDE, early SATA and SAS disks arrive most weeks; their age only changes which adapters and imagers come out.
Each further power-up asks more of a drive that has already begun to fail. Open the case first and let the free diagnosis tell you what is left.