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ADR / Media and machines / Repairing a hard disk

Drive repair · the mendable and the finished

Hard drive repair, London. Two different jobs share one word. Your files come back from only one of them.

One drive is £300 + VAT, one number, and it is written down for you after a diagnosis that you are not charged for. Two jobs share the same word. The amount paid is for the second job. One restores the physical hardware unit. The other extracts the contents from the damaged drive and returns only the files, and any files you get back always come from the second job. Boards can be restored. Firmware can be corrected. Platters, motors and head stack assemblies, however, cannot be restored or repaired; they are kept going temporarily for one read pass across the surfaces and then retired. Every one of the drives we receive from all over London, from Hammersmith, Barnet, Ealing, Southwark and elsewhere, ends up the same way, with your data transferred to new media specifically purchased for that purpose.

Only pay if we recover your data, on most jobs A free look first, then one figure in writing Media posted in from Croydon, Ealing and Camden

Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633

Hard drive repair: what the symptom usually means.

Different fault? Try the finder →
What is going onThe usual reason for itWhere that leaves you
There is a clicking/ticking. Can that be fixed?A head crash. That assembly is done for, and donor heads will only make it around the surface of the platters once, no moreRecovery territory, not repair
No light, no noise, no reactionThe circuit board, virtually every time: either a TVS diode has shorted through or else the electronics have died. A proper repair.Board mended, then cloned
Reports 0GB or responds under the title of another model.Faults in a service area module or in the translator, i.e. firmware issues, and firmware can be fixed.Firmware corrected, then imaged
The USB connector has pulled loose from the board of a portable unit.Socket and bridge board, and if the portable unit is a WD then the bridge chip holds its encryption keys.Get a quote first, then send the entire unit to us along with the case
Now a repair shop labels it 'working'Ask which part was replaced. If you were given an empty disk where your disk used to reside, you were given nothing.Do not pay any money before asking that.
Would a very cheap donor board obtained via eBay do it?The adaptive values within the ROM of a replacement board belong to another mechanism, and therefore when you install that board straight from the packet, you simply receive garbage noise.You need to transfer your own ROM onto it.
Packing it and posting it: get a quote first (by phone or with the form), then pad the box until nothing in it can move and send it to our Guildford intake lab by post, tracked and insured, or drop it off there yourself (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm) without prior appointment. We cover all return postage costs. Do you wish to speak with an engineer about the packing before you seal the box? Call us first. Full details are on the guide to packing and posting.

What mends, what is propped up, and what is finished.

Electronics: a repair in the plain senseIf a drive does not give any sign at all that it is alive, start looking at the board: did a TVS diode short through? Did the electronics die? Is it a USB drive whose bridge chip no longer acknowledges commands? Any of them would constitute a repair in the normal sense, and all of them are the least expensive good news anyone on this bench gets to deliver.
Firmware: mendable, with the right hardwareLet a single service area module fail or let the translator become corrupted, and you may find that a mechanically perfect disk tells you that it contains 0GB or simply disappears from the bus altogether. Structures that far down need purpose-built hardware before any information can reach them; no software can replace it.
Mechanics: one sweep, and that is allA spindle that has been freed off, a donor stack that has been fitted into place, heads eased back off a surface where they had come to rest: each of these buys one complete copy's worth of working life (and nothing extra). The mechanism should not be expected to continue working longer than the job it was woken up for.
Board swaps stopped working a long time agoThese measurements are made only once, upon leaving the factory, and their figures are stored in a ROM soldered to the board that left the factory alongside that mechanism. Mount another drive's board onto that mechanism, and your heads will return garbage where data should be. For your ROM to follow your heads, both a soldering iron and a programmer are needed.

From the box arriving to your files going back.

01

Logged the day it lands, and the first look costs nothing Free

As soon as your parcel arrives here, an engineer assigns a case number that same day, prior to determining what has really failed, which is the first thing done and costs you nothing. In addition to a note of what can and cannot be recovered from your drive, you will receive at the same time the fixed, written price for restoring what can be recovered. You can accept this quote, or decline it, which will result in no further obligation on your part and nothing owed to us.

Nothing to pay for lookingA single figure, put in writingNothing owed at this stage
02

Naming the part that failed

There are only three separate reasons why a disk will fail to operate: the electronic circuitry, the firmware and the mechanical components rotating inside. All three of the above are referred to as "a broken hard drive". This is why two quotations for the exact same symptoms can vary by hundreds of pounds. Your free diagnostic evaluation is designed to identify which component(s) need replacement or repair so that pricing discussion can occur thereafter.

The failed part is namedAhead of any talk of money
03

Alive just long enough to image

The ROM from your original board is transferred to your rebuilt board. Corrupt service area modules are corrected individually. When an originally installed mechanical component fails, donor parts take its place. The intent behind all of this is to allow for one unbroken sweep across the surfaces of your disk, from start to finish.

Its own ROM moved to the new boardStable enough for one copy
04

What returns is the data, not the drive

All the data lifted clear is inspected, documented and transferred onto media purchased new for your job. Your disk's sole function was to hold your data. What won't occur is your disk being returned to operation: its mechanism has completed its last read, and you'll be told so plainly.

Copied to new mediaThe tired mechanism is retired
05

You see the file list before you pay

You will see what has been recovered as a list first, after which a bill exists. Accepting the list means that a bill will be issued. Rejecting the list means that a bill will not be issued, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. The recovered data travels from here back to you via new media purchased specifically for your project, with the cost of postage paid by us. Your case is not resolved (i.e., "closed") until you personally view the files on a computer of your own.

No charge until you accept the figureFresh media, supplied with the jobThe post home is ours

What arrives most often

  • Almost nobody actually wants their equipment fixed: they want access to their data, not their equipment. So obtaining your data is what gets worked towards, regardless of which term was used during your initial conversation with us, and you'll be told clearly which term applies to your disk.
  • The swap never discussed: when a laptop returns from being repaired inexpensively and running beautifully, it has usually had a blank disk inserted instead of your original. Ask where your disk ended up, and inquire before you pay your bill.
  • Electrical failures are inexpensive: spikes kill boards immediately and without ever touching any of your disk's recording surfaces, making all such repairs relatively fast and simple to price.
  • A donor head purchase allows for a single read, not reliability: a single pass over all areas of the platters is all that a properly fitted donor head will give you. If you sell that on as a serviceable drive, you've simply booked somebody's next hardware failure.

Set down here, and held to: repairing a board is a typical repair, just as repairing firmware is a typical repair. Mechanical parts are only used (and thus only last) for exactly one copy. Whatever may have been under the coating after the coating has been stripped off a platter, there is no coming back from that, in our lab or anywhere else, no matter how the advertising is worded. The fact is that those three statements have remained true for years, and badges from companies such as Seagate, Toshiba, Western Digital and Hitachi continue to arrive here from London, Wandsworth, Hackney and Islington. One hard disk is £300 + VAT, written down for you when the free look is over, and on most jobs you only pay if we recover your data. If a company offers to rebuild or restore your damaged drive to a functional state capable of being used daily, please take the time to review their own literature and small print to see how much of that offer is still left.

One job, followed all the way through.

LDN · ADR-2026-3361JOB LOGGED ✓

The shop fitted a new disk; every essay was still on the old one.

The computer shop said that her 1TB Seagate (from her Dell) was no longer functional and that her files could not be recovered. As part of the replacement, they installed a new drive and, to their credit, handed her the old disk. That verdict only described what that shop's own bench could do. We ran PC-3000 diagnostics on the disk in order to determine the actual problem with it. Once we identified the issue, we created an exact image of her entire disk (using a write blocker), and her photographs and emails were read out of that image.

100% of them recoveredUndoing an earlier 'repair'

What helps, and what harms.

Do this much first

  • Ask the person who is repairing your disk where your data will end up.
  • Disconnect the power as quickly as possible whenever the noise of your disk starts changing.
  • Get a written agreement that states you will receive your original disk back.
  • First obtain a quote from us, then send us the caddy, any loose boards and all the small components.

What sets us back

  • Installing a donor board directly out of the box.
  • Using repair tools against a malfunctioning physical mechanism.
  • Trusting critical files to a disk built from donor components.
  • Believing that your data has survived just because your computer boots.

Questions answered before you commit.

Is a hard drive that has failed repairable at all?

Partially. Boards and firmware can both be fixed. This includes replacing a PCB with a rebuilt board with ROM taken from your original board, and repairing the service area one module at a time. Mechanisms are quite different. A donor head assembly has only one task, which is keeping itself together until the drive completes reading the data off the platters once, and after that job is done, it comes out. Your data then goes home, but the remainder of the drive does not.

Repair or recovery — which do I actually want?

Repair hands you back equipment that you can continue to use. Data recovery hands you back your data and abandons the hardware. When a disk has completely failed, only one of these two promises can be made truthfully, and the other one is why a laptop can leave a cheap repair operation running perfectly without any of its owner's files onboard. No repairs were made to anything there; the disk was simply exchanged for another disk.

Would a replacement circuit board sort it?

Very rarely, and never on its own. The adaptive parameters reside within a board's ROM, and they were based upon measurements made against a single mechanism: yours. Move the chip across to the donor board and reasonable answers begin appearing; fit a donor board to your drive as it came out of the package and the heads will produce noise. Moving it requires removal of solder, and removal of solder requires access to a workbench capable of doing that.

Disks are cheap. Why is this £300?

You're paying for something other than a disk. For £300 + VAT you'll get whatever was stored on the broken disk returned to you on functioning media. One price, put in writing at the conclusion of your complimentary diagnostic evaluation, and on most jobs you only pay if we recover your data. If you spend the money coaxing a failed mechanism along instead, you end up owning a component you would never trust again.

Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.

The drive inside the machine → The noises it is making → Nothing detects the disk → Every device we take →

Nothing gets worse while the power is off.

It doesn't cost you anything for us to look at it. All we do is give you a breakdown of what opened and what did not, plus a single fixed price to complete, written down before you agree to let us continue. On most jobs, you only pay if we recover your data. Please don't turn on the drive until you get that breakdown.

0203 0868633

Get it assessed Sending it to Guildford