Data Recovery on External Hard Disk Drives

We Can Recover Your Data

Discovering the loss of data is often a shock – this may be due to the volume of data involved or the fact that the information lost is simply irreplaceable. If you find you’re no longer able to access the data on your external hard drive, it’s important not to panic, as doing the wrong thing at this point will often make matters worse and potentially ruin the chances of a successful data recovery.

Most external hard disk recoveries we see are from home users who have their family photographs and movies stored on their hard drive, or from businesses who use their external hard drive as a backup device.

Popular external hard disk drives are made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Iomega, LG and LaCie.

Data Loss on External Drives

Most problems result from the hard drive being dropped – it doesn’t take anything significant like the drive falling down the stairs either, a drop of a few inches can often be enough. On other occasions the drive may have been knocked or banged, or may have received a power surge or spike. The most common failure symptoms are -

1. A Ticking Noise When Powered On – Often heard when the drive has been dropped, this noise frequently indicates a head failure.
2. A Beeping Noise When Powered On – Again very common if the hard drive has been dropped, this noise often indicates a seized motor.
3. The Drive Runs Slowly & Files / Folders Can Not Be Accessed – Usually a sign of wear and tear caused by bad media.
4. The Drive Appears Dead – Often caused by a power surge.

What Not To Do

As discussed above, failure of your external disk is often NOT terminal, but it’s important the situation isn’t made any worse. Here are 4 things often attempted that do significant damage to any recovery attempt. Do not do them.

1. Running Disk Checking Software like Scandisk, Chkdisk, Disk Utility – These are software programs that will attempt the fix problems that relate to the structure of the data on the hard drive. The problems listed above are not fixable by software BUT because the software doesn’t know this it will still try to fix them anyway. This will frequently result in the data you want to retrieve being made unrecoverable.
2. Reinstalling the Operating System – This will overwrite data on the hard disk you are trying to recover from. Often the data you want to recover is the same data that will be overwritten during the re-installation as the re-installation process can write data anywhere on the hard disk.
3. Changing the Controller Board – Controller boards are unique in that they contain a road map of the data that sits on the hard drive. Changing the board will use a different map and is a pointless exercise.
4. Freezing the Hard Drive – This is an internet myth. Ask yourself how this could possibly work… It doesn’t work… What it does do though is to cause further damage to the hard drive by freezing parts of it.

Why Choose DataClinic

Established in 2002, few companies have invested as much time and effort in data recovery as DataClinic. This has enabled us to develop unique diagnosis and recovery procedures that allow us to recover data from almost any data loss situation.

Please contact us and we’ll discuss the problem you are having, or, if you’d like us to call you back please use the contact form at the top of the page. We are happy to talk to you and provide a general idea of what the problem is and what actions are needed to remedy the situation. We have a number of regional UK locations where you are welcome to call in, or why not take advantage of our countrywide collection service that will collect from anywhere in the UK.

We will discuss your requirement without there being any obligation to use our services. You will also have the facts & figures on price and timeframe before deciding to use our services.