Devices · disks with spinning platters
Four parts of a spinning drive give out: heads, spindle motor, circuit board, firmware. Each gets worse, never better, for every further attempt the machine makes — and those attempts score a surface that would have imaged cleanly an hour before. Cut the power and leave it cut, wherever in London it is sitting. Which part went is a bench question, answered at no charge, and one drive is £300 + VAT, written down before any chargeable work starts.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
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| What is going on | The usual reason for it | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| The drive will not open, and Windows suggests formatting it | Windows cannot read the index, so it labels the volume RAW — though nothing written to the disk has moved | Cut the power, and turn down every format offer |
| A copy stops with: Data error (cyclic redundancy check) | A sector failed its checksum, and the surface below it is usually going | Give up on the copy and image the disk whole |
| 0x8007045D, an I/O device error: the request never completes | Commands are still unanswered when the timeout expires | Switch it off, and copy down the full model number |
| A pop-up saying Windows detected a hard disk problem | A SMART value has run past the limit set for it | Image the whole disk, rather than picking files off it |
| 0x800701E3 — the device is reporting a hardware error | Mid-copy, the disk stops answering on the bus | Nothing more to retry. This is bench work |
| SMART Status BAD, Backup and Replace, at power-on | It has already failed a self-test of its own | That machine must never boot off it again |
| A capacity of 0GB, or a model name that is gibberish | A damaged service area leaves the drive describing itself wrongly | Firmware work, and nowhere but the bench |
A case number goes on it the day the parcel lands, and an engineer settles what has truly failed before anything else happens — free of charge, and first in the order of work. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.
Nothing is repaired before a copy exists. Imaging hardware reads your disk at whatever rate the mechanism will tolerate, setting anything stubborn aside for a final pass rather than hammering at it. Only once that copy is secure does the real work start.
Donor heads are matched to your own drive before they go in. A spindle that will not turn is freed. Where the fault is the board, the ROM chip is lifted off it and fitted to the replacement.
Your disk has left the process by then, and the rest happens on the copy. The file system is rebuilt there, and you get the list of recovered files long before a bill exists.
What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge whatever. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have read those files on a machine of your own.
How often do drives really fail? The only large published dataset comes from Backblaze's Drive Stats, which put the annualised figure at 1.36% over roughly 344,000 disks through 2025, where 2024 gave 1.57%. Those live in racks at a steady temperature. Yours lives under a desk in Walthamstow or Bermondsey, gets knocked, gets unplugged mid-write, moves house, and has never had its SMART data read. Take 1.36% as the floor.
By the time it reached us the drive had been standing idle for weeks, two heads already gone. A matched donor supplied replacements. The very first imaging pass on its own gave back 96%. Once the owner had been through the list, new media carried home the ledgers, the invoices and family photographs going back decades.
Usually not. A click is a head fault, and the heads hold none of your data — it lies on the platters they travel over, and the noise says nothing at all about those. What the noise does say is that the servo pattern the heads steer by has stopped answering. Donors supply replacement heads, each surface is read slowly, and most clickers return the bulk of their contents. That proportion drops with every fresh attempt to power it up.
Usually there is — say who had it open and what they did. Dust rides in on ordinary room air, and once it settles on a platter the work can fall outside the terms that keep most jobs no-fee. An engineer goes over the surfaces under a light before any price is put on it.
£300 + VAT covers one drive. Looking at it beforehand costs nothing, that figure arrives on paper, and until you say yes nothing chargeable has happened. Logical faults sit at the foot of the band; matched donor parts and time spent in filtered air raise it. On most jobs an invoice only follows recovered data.
IDE, early SATA and SAS all reach the bench most weeks. Age changes the adapter and the imager sitting behind it, and it changes nothing else about the work.
Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the drive switched off.