Devices · hard disk drives
Four parts fail on a spinning drive: the heads, the spindle motor, the board and the firmware. None of them mend while a computer keeps retrying the disk, and it is the retries that turn a readable drive into a scored one. Pull the power out. Leave it out, wherever in Hull the drive sits. Let a bench decide which of the four it is.
An engineer will take the details
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| What you see | What the fault is | What to try |
|---|---|---|
| The disk in drive X: is not formatted. Do you want to format it now? | No readable file table, so the volume comes up as RAW. What was written on it is still there | Power it down. Do not let anything format it |
| Data error (cyclic redundancy check) | A sector's checksum did not match on read — the surface is usually going | Stop copying. Image the whole disk |
| 0x8007045D — the request failed with an I/O device error | The drive stops answering commands before the timeout runs out | Switch it off. Note the exact model number |
| Windows detected a hard disk problem | One or more SMART attributes have crossed their limits | Image the lot. Do not pick files off it |
| 0x800701E3 — a fatal device hardware error | The disk drops off the bus in the middle of a copy | No more retries. This one belongs on a bench |
| SMART Status BAD, Backup and Replace | The drive's own test has already written it off | Do not boot the machine off it again |
| Capacity reads 0GB, or the model name comes back as nonsense | Unreadable service area, so the drive gives the wrong identity | A firmware job for the lab |
Each item that arrives gets a case number the day it lands. An engineer looks at it and finds the real fault, and that costs you nothing. You are told in plain terms which files can come off the drive and which cannot. A price follows — one figure, written down. No work starts until you have seen it and agreed to it.
Nothing is repaired until a copy exists. The disk goes onto a hardware imager, which reads at whatever speed the drive will bear and leaves the awkward areas until last rather than grinding at them. Only once that image is safe does anything else start.
Heads come off a donor drive matched to yours. A seized spindle is freed. A burnt board gives up its ROM chip to the replacement.
All of this happens on the image, never on your disk. The file system is put back together there, and the listing of recovered files reaches you before anything is invoiced.
You are not billed while you are still thinking. The list of what came off the drive goes to you first, and the invoice waits on your word. Files go home on media bought in for the job, with the postage back on us. We keep the job open until you have opened them on your own machine.
What are the odds of a drive failing this year? The one large public dataset is Backblaze's Drive Stats: 1.36% annualised across the 344,000-plus disks it runs itself in 2025, down from 1.55% the year before. A drive under a desk in Hull is not in that fleet. It gets knocked, unplugged and carried about, and nobody reads its SMART data. Take the figure as a floor.
The disk had not turned for weeks, and two of its heads were dead. A matched donor stack went in. On the first imaging pass 96% came off, and the books, the invoices and a lot of family photographs were checked and sent back.
Usually not. A click means the heads have lost the servo pattern they navigate by. That says nothing about the platters underneath, and the platters are where your files sit. With donor heads fitted and a slow pass over the surface, most clicking disks give up the bulk of their contents. Every time it is powered up again, that figure drops.
Normally yes. Tell us exactly what was done to it and by whom. Ordinary room air carries dust, and dust already settled on a platter can push a job outside no-recovery-no-fee. So nothing is priced until an engineer has been over the surfaces.
Diagnosis costs nothing. You then get one price in writing, and no chargeable work starts until you accept it. Logical faults sit at the bottom of the range; donor parts and time in filtered air sit at the top. As a guide, a single drive is £300 + VAT.
Yes. IDE, early SATA and SAS drives reach the bench most weeks. Age decides which adapter and which imager come out, and nothing beyond that.
Leave it switched off. A failing drive has a limited number of starts in it, and each one spends a little more. The free diagnosis will say which files can be read.