Hard drive repair · what mends, and what does not
A single drive is £300 + VAT: one figure in writing after a diagnosis which costs you nothing. That figure buys the second of two jobs called by the same name. One job is mending the hardware; the other is getting the data off, and this is the only one that ends with your files. The electronics and firmware can genuinely be repaired. Heads, motors and platters cannot: they are held together for just one careful pass, then put out of commission. Drives arrive at our bench from Reading, Caversham, Tilehurst, Didcot, Goring and Streatley and Lambourn, and each job finishes the same way, on new media purchased specifically for your job.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
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| What you are seeing | What is likely wrong | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| Does it tick, or does it click? Can that be fixed? | A head crash: the stack is finished. Donor heads are good for just one full sweep of the surfaces, and afterwards the mechanism will not function again | A recovery, not a repair |
| Silent: no light, no sound, nothing at all | Nearly always the board (a shorted TVS diode, or bad electronics). A true repair | Board repaired, then imaged |
| It reports 0GB, or answers to the wrong model name | The translator, or a service area module, is corrupt. Firmware, and firmware can be fixed | Firmware corrected, then read off |
| The USB socket has been ripped off a portable | Repairing the socket and the bridge board. On a WD portable, the bridge chip houses the AES engine, whereas the encryption key resides in a reserved sector on the disk, wrapped by your password or by a default one if no password has been set | Get a quote, then send it whole, with its cable |
| A shop returned it 'working' | Ask exactly which part was changed. An empty hard drive in the bay where yours used to be will not return any of your files | Get that answer before paying |
| Is buying a pre-owned board from eBay going to save you money? | The ROM on that board holds adaptives for another mechanism, so a donor installed as it arrives reads back noise | Your own ROM has to move across |
A case number is assigned to your device when we receive it. An engineer then finds the real fault (free) before anything else occurs; you will be advised clearly of what will be returned and what will not, along with a single written price. Charges cannot begin until you have read this and accepted.
A disk stops for three unrelated reasons: it fails electronically, the firmware controlling the disk fails, or the mechanical part that spins inside it fails. Most people use the term 'broken hard drive' for all three, which is why quotes for the same symptom can differ by hundreds of pounds. The free diagnosis names which type of failure you are holding, before any money is discussed.
Your ROM moves onto a repaired board. Each module in the service area is put right, one by one. Donor mechanics are installed in place of every original part that has failed. All of these steps serve only one purpose: one continuous pass across all the surfaces, from start to finish.
Everything lifted off is verified and listed for your records, and written to media purchased specifically for the job. The drive itself was only ever the container. If light duty is left in it, we will tell you so. When the mechanism is finished, we will let you know that too.
You look at the file list first and make a decision about what to do. We will never invoice anything until you have said yes, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. All of the information that we recover will be put on new media purchased by us specifically for this job, and our company pays the cost of postage back to you. The case stays open on the bench until you tell us the files open on your own machine.
Written down here, and held to: boards and firmware can both be mended; they are ordinary repairs. Heads and motors can be kept in working order for a single copy, and no further. Nothing comes back once a platter has been scored through its coating, on this bench or at anyone else's, regardless of what an advertisement states. None of that has changed in years, and drives badged Seagate, Toshiba, Western Digital and Maxtor continue to arrive from Reading, Earley, Thatcham and Caversham. If a firm states it will return the failed drive itself, fit for daily use, read its terms and conditions and compare the offer with what they contain.
A repair shop fitted a new disk and gave the owner back a laptop with nothing on it. The old drive, written off, was put in a drawer in a student flat in Earley, close to the Whiteknights campus, where it sat ticking. It reached the bench, where a donor head stack went in. Two days later, the photos and essays from the old drive had been transferred onto the shop's new disk.
In part. The board is a real fix. So is the firmware: your own ROM on a rebuilt PCB, and a service area corrected module by module. Anything that turns is different. Donor heads are fitted only to hold together long enough to make one pass across the surfaces, and then that mechanism is retired. Your data goes home; the drive does not.
A repair gives you back working hardware. A recovery gets your files back and writes off the hardware. Once a disk has genuinely failed, only one of those is honest, and the other is how a laptop comes back from a cheap fix running sweetly with none of the owner's work anywhere on it. The disk had been replaced; it hadn't been repaired.
Rarely, and never alone. A board's ROM contains adaptive values measured against one mechanism only. Move that chip across to the donor board and the disk reads data as expected. Fit the same donor board without any changes at all and you will see the heads reading random noise instead of what is really on the media. That means you have to desolder the chip and carry it over, on a bench configured for exactly this task.
Because you aren't buying a disk when you spend £300 + VAT; what you are spending that money on is the contents of the drive that stopped, delivered back to you on media that actually works. It is one figure, written down after a free diagnosis, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Spend the same amount nursing the failed mechanism along instead, and all you own at the end is a component nobody would trust.
There is no charge for the look. You then receive a list of the files that opened, those that did not, and a fixed amount to complete the job. Keep it switched off until you have received that in writing.