Hard drive repair · what mends, and what does not
A single drive is £300 + VAT: one figure, in writing, after a diagnosis that costs you nothing. What that figure buys is the second of two jobs sharing a name. Mending the hardware is one job; lifting the contents off is the other, and only the other ends with your files. Electronics and firmware do genuinely mend. Heads, motors and platters do not — they are held together for one careful pass, then retired. Disks come to the bench from Reading, Caversham, Tilehurst, Didcot, Goring and Streatley and Lambourn, and every job finishes the same way, on media we buy new for your job.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
0800 6890668
| What you are seeing | What is likely wrong | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| It ticks, or it clicks — can that be mended? | A head crash: the stack is finished. Donor heads are good for one full sweep of the surfaces, and the mechanism is spent afterwards | A recovery, not a repair |
| Silent — no light, no noise, nothing at all | Almost always the board: a shorted TVS diode, or electronics that have failed. This one is a true repair | Board repaired, then imaged |
| It reports 0GB, or answers to the wrong model name | The translator, or a module in the service area, is corrupt. Firmware — and firmware mends | Firmware corrected, then read off |
| The USB socket has come away from a portable | Socket and bridge-board repair — and on a WD portable the bridge chip holds the AES engine while the encryption key sits in a reserved sector on the disk, wrapped by the password or by a default when none is set | Send it whole, enclosure and all |
| A shop returned it 'working' | Ask precisely which part was changed. An empty disk in the bay where yours used to be returns none of your files | Get that answer before paying |
| Would a used board off eBay be cheaper? | Its ROM holds adaptives belonging to another mechanism, so a donor fitted as it arrives reads back noise | Your own ROM has to move across |
A case number goes on your device the day it reaches us, and an engineer then finds the real fault — free, and before anything else happens. You are told plainly what will come back and what will not, with one fixed figure in writing beside it. Nothing chargeable starts until you have read that and said yes.
A disk stops for three unrelated reasons: its electronics, its firmware, or the mechanism spinning inside it. All three get called a broken hard drive, which is why quotes for one symptom differ by hundreds of pounds. The free diagnosis names which of the three you are holding, before any money is discussed.
Your ROM moves onto a rebuilt board. Modules in the service area are put right one by one. Donor mechanics go in wherever the originals have failed. Each of those steps serves one purpose only: a single uninterrupted sweep of the surfaces, beginning to end.
Everything lifted off is verified, listed for you and written to media bought in new for the job. The drive was only ever the container. Where light duty is left in it, we tell you so. Where the mechanism is finished, we tell you that.
You see the file list first, then decide. Nothing is invoiced until you have said yes, and on most jobs there is no fee at all if the data does not come back. What we pull off goes onto media bought in for your job, and the postage home is ours. 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 mend and firmware mends, both of them ordinary repairs. Heads and motors are held together for a single copy, no further than that. Where a platter has been scored through its coating nothing comes back, on this bench or on anybody else's, whatever an advertisement claims. None of that has shifted in years, and disks badged Seagate, Toshiba, Western Digital and Maxtor keep arriving from Reading, Earley, Thatcham and Caversham. If a firm offers to return the failed drive itself, fit for daily use, set that offer beside its own small print and see what remains of it.
A repair shop fitted a new disk and handed back a laptop with nothing on it. The old drive, written off, went into a drawer in a student flat in Earley, near the Whiteknights campus, where it sat ticking. It reached the bench, where a donor head stack went in. Two days on, the photographs and the essays were sitting on the shop's new disk.
In part. The board is a real repair. So is the firmware — a rebuilt PCB carrying your own ROM, and a service area corrected module by module. Anything that turns is different. Donor heads are fitted to do one thing only, which is hold together for a single sweep of the surfaces, and that mechanism is retired at the end of it. Your data goes home; the drive does not.
A repair hands you working hardware back. A recovery hands you the files and writes the hardware off. When a disk has genuinely failed, only one of those two is honest — and the other is how a laptop returns from a cheap fix running sweetly with none of the owner's work anywhere on it. The drive was replaced, not mended.
Rarely, and never by itself. The ROM on a board holds adaptive values measured against one mechanism and no other. Take that chip with you and the disk answers properly. Fit the donor board untouched and the heads read noise instead of data. That means desoldering the chip and carrying it over, on a bench set up for exactly that.
Because a disk is not what you are buying here. What £300 + VAT buys is the contents of the drive that stopped, returned to you on media that works — one figure, written down after a free diagnosis, and on most jobs no fee at all where nothing comes back. Put the same money into nursing a failed mechanism along and all you own at the end is a component nobody would trust.
You pay nothing for the look. What comes back is a list — the files that opened, the ones that did not, and one fixed figure to finish the job. Leave it switched off until you have that in writing.