Devices · mechanical hard disks
Four things fail on a hard disk: the heads, the motor, the board, the firmware. Not one of them mends itself while the machine keeps trying, and what you do in the first hour matters more than which of the four it turns out to be. Leave the power off, send it to us from anywhere in Birmingham, and let the bench decide.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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| What you see | What is behind it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| You need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it | The file table will not read, so Windows calls the volume RAW; the files are still there | Pull the power. Do not let it format |
| Data error (cyclic redundancy check) | A sector's checksum came back wrong; failing media is the usual cause | Stop copying. Image the whole disk |
| 0x8007045D — an I/O device error: the request could not be performed | Commands go out and time out unanswered | Shut it down; write down the model |
| Windows detected a hard disk problem | SMART counters have passed their thresholds | Image it now; do not copy files off |
| 0x800701E3 — a fatal device hardware error | The disk vanishes from the bus part-way through a transfer | Stop retrying. This one needs the bench |
| SMART Status BAD, Backup and Replace | It has failed the test it runs on itself | Do not boot from that disk again |
| The BIOS lists 0GB, or a scrambled model name | The service area is unreadable, so the drive reports nonsense | Lab work on the firmware |
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.
The disk goes onto a hardware imager before anything else. It reads at its own speed, working round the difficult regions instead of battering them, and no repair starts until that copy is safe.
Donor heads come out of a drive matched to yours, a stuck spindle is freed, and a burnt board gives up its ROM to the one that takes its place.
All of that is done on the image. The file system is reassembled there, and you see the list of recovered files before anything is charged.
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.
What are the odds of a drive dying this year? The only large public dataset is Backblaze's Drive Stats, which puts 2025 at 1.36% annualised over more than 344,000 disks in its own datacentres, against 1.57% the year before. The disks reaching us from Birmingham homes and offices work gentler hours and fail less often — they simply give less warning when they do.
Nothing inside had turned for weeks, and two of the heads were gone. A donor stack went in, the first imaging pass lifted 96% of it, and the ledgers, invoices and photographs went home checked.
Rarely. What you are hearing is a head assembly that can no longer lock onto the servo pattern, and the platters underneath are a separate question with a happier answer. Fit donor heads, read the surface slowly, and most clicking drives hand over most of what was on them. Every restart makes that harder.
Usually, yes — but say plainly what was done to it. A disk opened in ordinary room air gets no price until an engineer has looked over the platters, and dust already sitting on those surfaces can put the job outside no-recovery-no-fee.
Nothing is charged for the diagnosis, and no billable work begins until one figure has been put to you in writing. Logical faults sit at the cheap end of the scale; donor parts and clean-air work carry a job higher. The number is settled before we start.
Yes. Old IDE, early SATA and SAS disks land here most weeks. Their age changes nothing but the adapters and imagers we reach for.
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.