Specialist cases · disk repair
Drives arrive at this bench from across Birmingham and the West Midlands, and the work done on them has one object: getting at the contents before the mechanism dies for good. A board is rebuilt and firmware put right because that unlocks the door. Donor heads go in because they will hold for one full pass over the platters. None of it is built to last. What comes back to you is the data, on new media.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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| What you see | What is behind it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| It is clicking. Is that fixable? | A failed head stack; donor heads last one clean pass and the drive is then scrap | That is recovery, not repair |
| No sound, no sign of power | Usually a blown TVS diode or a dead PCB — electronic, and properly repairable | Fix the board, then image it |
| Reports 0GB, or names itself as a different model | A damaged translator or service-area module — that can be put right | Firmware work first, then imaging |
| The USB socket has broken off my external drive | Connector and bridge work, a real repair; on WD portables that bridge also holds the encryption | Post it whole, enclosure and all |
| A repair shop says it is 'sorted' | Ask exactly which part was changed; an empty disk where yours used to be gives you nothing | Check before you relax |
| Why not just fit a donor board? | That board's ROM carries adaptives belonging to one drive only, so an unmodified donor returns rubbish | Your own ROM has to go over |
Every item gets a case number of its own the day it lands. An engineer then works out what has actually failed and tells you plainly which files have a real chance of coming back and which do not. Only then does a price follow: one figure, fixed, in writing, and it costs you nothing to see it. Nothing is charged until you say yes.
'Broken' hides three separate trades — electronics, firmware, mechanics. The free assessment decides which of them you are dealing with, and what mending it would really mean.
Your own ROM lifted onto a rebuilt board, service-area modules put back in order, donor mechanics where the originals failed — every move aimed at one uninterrupted read.
What you get back is checked, listed and written to media we buy new. The disk was only ever the box it came in. Should yours still be fit for undemanding use, you will hear that; when it is not, you will hear that too.
No invoice is raised until the full list of recovered files has sat in front of you and you have said go ahead. Your data comes back on media we buy new, posted at our expense, and the job is not closed here until every file has opened on your own machine.
In writing, and stood behind: the electronics and the firmware are properly mendable. Heads and motors get patched to last one copy and nothing beyond it. A scored platter surface cannot be read past by any lab anywhere, whatever the adverts say. None of that changes with age, and drives carrying IBM, HGST, Hitachi and Fujitsu labels still turn up at this bench from across Birmingham and the West Midlands. Where a company undertakes to hand a dead disk back in working condition, hold that against its own small print and see how much survives.
A Birmingham student got the laptop back running sweetly, on a brand-new disk holding nothing at all. The original, written off as dead, sat in a drawer at home, still clicking. Donor heads went in, and inside two days every essay and photograph was on the replacement disk the shop had fitted.
Two parts of it can. A board is rebuilt and a damaged service-area module put back in order — both proper repairs. The moving parts are a different story: donor heads are only asked to survive one pass over the platters, and the drive is scrapped afterwards rather than sent home. Either way you end up with a copy on new media.
A repair sets out to give you a working device back. A recovery goes after the contents and writes the device off. Once a drive has genuinely failed only the second is on the table, which is how a laptop comes home from a 'repair' running beautifully with none of your files on it.
Very seldom, and never by itself. Every board holds a small ROM full of adaptive values measured against one particular mechanism, so that chip has to come off your original and go onto the replacement before the platters read as anything but noise. That is soldering work, done at a bench.
New disks are cheap, which is exactly why that comparison misses the point. A recovery buys you the contents, handed over on hardware that works. Paying to put a failed disk back into service buys you a part no sensible person would trust with anything again.
Every extra power-up takes something off a drive that is already going. Leave it switched off and let the free diagnosis say what still reads.