External Hard Drive Data Recovery – Help and Advice

We get a lot of enquiries for external hard drive recovery. Most of us have at least one portable drive to keep our data on and below are a selection of questions that were asked this weekend. To help, I’ve put the links to the various parts of the site where you’ll find more information and advice. Perhaps you have a similar problem with a hard disk to the ones below?

  • My external harddrive suddenly stopped being recognised by my computer while I was using it. It makes a wiring sound when you connect it to the laptop. I would love to be able to get the photos off it. How much does the service usually cost and is there still a fee if you do not retrieve any data?
  • External hard drive, light comes on but doesn’t spin and not recognised when plugged in. Lots of photographs lost. I am in London
  • I have a USB drive which some files got deleted and I need back. How much would this cost to recover? Do you have an office in Bradford I can take the harddisk to?
  • I have a Toshiba Equium P300-190 which I have dropped. The hard drive sounds like its running up but fails to be recognised. I have had the hard drive removed and connected to recovery equipment but it was unable to be read. What would be the cost of possibly rebuilding it to recover the data?
  • I have a WD notebook external hard-drive with about 500 gigs of video and photos on it. There appears to be logical damage to this, so I can’t access any of the files. It keep having in/out read errors, and the content on it cannot be accessed with Linux or windows. There is also a possibility it might be physical damage, but I can’t tell. The hard-drive is about 4 years old. Can I ask if you think you could extract anything off it, and how much it might cost to do this?
  • My samsung M3 external hard drive recently stopped working and makes a slight ticking noise for a few seconds when plugged into the usb port. I have been known to knock it and drop it from time to time so maybe thats the cause based on what you describe. Im desperate for the data to be recovered from it and was wondering about what it would cost to recover approx 500gb of data??
  • hi i have a nokia lumia 925 that is dead ideally i would like it fixed with the data intact or data/pics retrieved.
  • I would like to know whether would be possible to have an idea about how much of my data would be able to be recovered before I actually pay for. The reason is that as far as I found out with computer repair shops on the Wirral there will be no way to recover all my data however they think it would be possible to recover part of it anyway.
  • I have a western digital passport external hard drive, when i plug it in to my laptop it does not show up in file explorer, however it comes up on device manager. Please could you give me a call back ASAP! I really need the files on my hard drive.
  • I have a 1TB Seagate drive. I plugged it into a USB hub that started smelling like a burning wire. I unplugged the drive and now it won’t mount and the light on it won’t turn on. I have done some research and apparently it can be repaired with soldering. Do you provide this service and how much does it costs? Thank you

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