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HDR / The work we take on / Seagate data recovery

Specialist · Seagate disks and externals

Seagate recovery in Hull. The badge covers many drives; the ST number says which is on the bench.

Seagate drives arrive here from all over Hull and the East Riding, and most of them are externals — an Expansion or a Backup Plus off a desk at home, usually the only place the photographs live. The rest are Barracudas out of desktops, IronWolf disks pulled from a NAS, and SkyHawk units taken out of CCTV recorders. One badge, several different machines. Read the ST number off the label before you ring. It tells us the platter count, whether the tracks overlap, and what donor parts we would have to find.

Most jobs: nothing back, nothing to pay Free to look at, then one fixed price Parcels come in from Beverley, Grimsby and Skegness

An engineer will take the details
0800 6890668

Putting a name to the symptom.

Nothing similar? Go to the triage →
What you seeWhat the fault isWhat to try
Ticking from a Seagate external driveThe heads have gone down. What was written on the platters has notUnplug it and leave it off
Windows lists it, but says 0GBSeagate's firmware area has broken; the platters are untouchedBench work over a serial port
A DVR disk will not read in a PCRecorders write their own layout, which Windows cannot make sense ofUsually comes back
A Barracuda has got slower for monthsSectors are being retried over and over; shingled models drag worstGet a copy off it today
An IronWolf has dropped out of the NASOne member is out. A rebuild onto a sick disk makes it worseStop the rebuild and ring us
A FireCuda has stopped being listedFireCuda covers both a hybrid disk and an NVMe SSDTell us which one you have
Sending it to us: pack it well, insure it for the full value and send it tracked to the Leeds intake lab. Return postage is ours. If you want an engineer to look over the packing before you tape the box shut, ring first. The detail is in the sending page.

What is under the Seagate badge, and how each one fails.

Expansion, Backup Plus, One TouchThe portables, and the bulk of what we get sent. A 2.5in disk, a plastic shell, and a USB board soldered onto it — there is no SATA connector hiding behind the case to fall back on. When one of these ticks it is the heads, and the answer is donor parts and a slow copy.
Barracuda and FireCudaThe disks inside desktops and games machines. A Barracuda is the ordinary 3.5in drive, and the bigger ones lay their tracks overlapping, so a copy runs for days rather than hours. FireCuda is two products under one name: a hybrid disk with flash bolted on, and a plain NVMe SSD. They fail differently, so the model number settles it.
IronWolf, SkyHawk, ExosThe drives built for one job. IronWolf sits in NAS boxes, SkyHawk in CCTV recorders, Exos in servers. When one fails you are usually looking at an array or a recorder, not a lone disk.
The firmware areaEvery Seagate keeps its own settings on the platters, including the map from a block number to a place on the disk. Break that and a healthy drive says 0GB, or gives a name that is not its own, or spins up and says nothing at all. No program on your PC can reach it, because the drive never gets that far. It is repaired over a serial connection at the bench.

From the box arriving to the files going back.

Jobs we have logged →
01

A case number first, then a free diagnosis Free

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.

The diagnosis is freeOne price, put in writingNothing to pay yet
02

Heard before it is worked on

Nothing goes near a computer. The drive is photographed, the ST number read off the label, then given a few seconds of power on the bench so an engineer can hear it. Ticking, beeping and silence point different ways. One that ticks goes off again.

Photographed on arrivalWhat has actually failed
03

Copied before it is touched

The whole disk is imaged first, and every later step runs on that copy. Weak zones get short passes with the worst left until the end, and on a shingled drive that can run for days. Nothing is ever written back to your disk — the wear falls on the copies.

Imaged before any repairYour disk stays read-only
04

Heads, or the firmware area

Which it is decides the work. A head stack is changed in filtered air against a donor of the same model and production run, then the drive is read slowly. A broken firmware area is a different job: repaired module by module over a serial link, case never opened.

Donor heads, in filtered airFirmware read over serial
05

You sign it off, then it comes back

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.

You approve the listing firstCopied onto new mediaReturn postage at our cost

What turns up most often

  • Externals are what get posted in — an Expansion or a Backup Plus, one drive, one copy, and no backup anywhere else. They tick because the heads have gone. Nothing you can install will alter that, and each go at plugging it in again takes a little more off the surface.
  • A drive reporting 0GB is not a wiped drive — it has lost the map to its own contents, and the platters are as full as they ever were. A PC cannot reach a disk that never finishes introducing itself, so the work is done over a serial port instead. It is one of the more dependable jobs we take in.
  • Shingled drives read slowly, and that is normal — the tracks overlap, so the disk shuffles data about rather than writing straight to it. A 4TB portable can take days to read off. Nothing makes it faster. Being told the job will run into next week is not a sign it is going badly.
  • The label is worth photographing — the ST number carries the size, the form factor, whether the tracks overlap and which donor parts would have to be found. On an external it hides under the shell, so read out what you can see on the outside and we will work the rest out here.

What comes back, and what does not: most Seagate faults are ordinary. Heads fail and get replaced. A firmware area breaks and is repaired over a serial port. A shingled drive reads slowly and eventually reads. The surface itself is where we have to be blunt. A head stack that has already been dragged across the platters can leave scoring behind, and a scored track gives up nothing — no laboratory recovers what is no longer there, whatever it charges for trying. The same goes for anything overwritten. If a recorder has looped over the footage, or a format has been followed by weeks of use, part of it has gone for good. A portable with hardware encryption on it needs your password, because the encryption is real and we cannot get round it. And we do not take phones or tablets at all. Where the answer is no, you get it on the phone, and it costs you nothing.

One case from the casebook.

HU · HUL-2026-0841LOGGED ✓

A Backup Plus that spun up and said nothing

It came in from an accountancy office in Beverley: a 4TB Backup Plus that had been fine on the Friday and invisible by the Monday. It spun, sounded right, and no machine would list it. The fault was in the firmware area rather than the disk — the drive was hanging before it ever announced itself. The case was opened, the disk wired up directly, and the modules read and repaired over a serial port until it reported its right size. Every sector copied on the first pass. Three days, start to finish.

100% copied3 days after it landed

Before you box it up.

Do these first

  • Send the whole external — case, lead and power supply
  • Read us the ST number printed on the drive's label
  • Say what you heard: ticking, beeping or nothing
  • Tell us if anyone has already opened it

What not to do

  • Plugging a ticking drive back in to check
  • Letting a surface scan loose on a sick disk
  • Updating the firmware to see if that helps
  • Moving the circuit board onto another drive

Asked most weeks, answered here.

My Seagate external ticks. Is anything still on it?

Yes, nearly always. Ticking is the heads failing to find their place — the arm parks, retries and parks again. It is a noise the mechanism makes, not a noise the data makes. Whatever was written on the platters is still written there. The trouble is that nothing can read it until the heads have been changed, and every further attempt to power the drive up drags the worn ones over the surface once more. Switch it off, leave it off, and let a bench take the copy.

Does the model number on the label actually matter?

It helps a great deal. The ST number gives us the family, the capacity, the size of the drive, how many platters sit inside it and whether the tracks overlap — which is what decides how long the copy will run. On a head job it also narrows the hunt for donor parts, since a stack only fits a drive of the same model and production run. On an external the label is under the shell, so read out whatever is printed on the outside and the rest can wait until it lands.

Can you get footage off a SkyHawk out of a CCTV recorder?

Often, yes. A surveillance drive is an ordinary hard disk, so a failed one is repaired and imaged like any other. The recorder is the awkward part: DVRs and NVRs lay down their own layout, and a PC will show the disk as unformatted even when it is full. We work from the copy and lift the video out of that. What nobody can do is bring back a clip the recorder has already written over. Most of them loop, so if the footage matters, take the disk out and stop it recording now.

What exactly do I send, and where does the parcel go?

Send the drive. An external goes as it is, in its case, with the lead and any power supply. A disk out of a desktop, a NAS or a recorder travels bare, in an antistatic bag inside a padded box, with no bubble wrap against the board. If it came out of an array, mark the bays as you take them out. We cannot take phones or tablets. Nobody collects, so post it insured and tracked to the Leeds intake lab, or bring it in yourself.

What people read after this.

Built-in drives → The noise it makes → Not seen by the PC → Everything we take in →

A drive left switched off loses nothing more.

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.

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Have it looked at How to post it to us