4 Common Hard Drive Faults - Data Recovery Q&A

Here are 4 of the most common type of hard drive fault, recently submitted to the Data Clinic data recovery team. It’s important to note that not all hard drive faults are the same and whilst it’s relatively straight forward to recover data from some, others can be very difficult to extract the data from and a small number can prove impossible. In all the four examples below it should be possible for us to rescue the data off of the device.

Question: I have a Seagate Expansion Portable Hard Drive 500 GB. I have it for 5 years so far and yesterday I bought a new USB cable have tried to down some data to my laptop. In the middle of that it has stopped and pulled the cable out. When I try again to put it in it either beeps or it does not recognise the device.
When can I bring the device?

Answer: It seems that your hard drive was accidentally knocked off something like a table whilst it was powered on and connected to your computer. The beeping is not a good sign and usually means that the hard drives platters are now no longer rotating. This can be caused by either (a) Stiction (b) Motor failure (c) A spindle jam. All 3 causes are serious and mean that the hard drive now has a physical fault and requires clean room attention in order to attempt to retrieve your files. We have locations around the UK, including London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Glasgow and Sheffield – click to see our local data recovery locations near you.

Question: Seagate expansion disk.
Accidently knocked over and now makes whirring noise when plugged in, still sounds like its connected but not showing up on my devices. The drive is showing on my drivers list but not the others.
I have a lot of vital information on the drive.

Answer: Whilst the cause of this fault was almost identical to the one above it seems the type of failure is very different. The absence of a beeping sound is a good sign and rules out any type of motor or spindle failure. There are many other potential problems with the hard drive but without anymore symptoms it’s difficult to diagnose the problem any further without asking you some more questions to home in on the problem.

Question: My wife’s phone will no longer turn on after being dropped in water. She has some photos that she would like retrieved. Can you offer an approximate quote for this please?

Answer: Water damaged phones are one of the most common problems we get asked to recover the data from. Read more about our phone data recovery service.

Question: I have a Western Digital wireless hard drive that I cannot now access either by wireless or USB. I don’t know why it suddenly failed. I was hoping that you could provide me with a quote to recover the data.

Answer: One of the first things you should check is whether it’s the hard drive’s casing that is malfunctioning rather than the hard drive itself. Remove the hard drive from it’s case and hook it up directly to you computer using a USB cable. If everything is working fine then it’s your case and there’s nothing wrong with the hard drive. If the symptoms are no different then it’s time to do some hard drive troubleshooting.

advice, data, disk, phone, recover

Data Clinic Reviews

Data Clinic Ltd

4.5

Jacob Greenwood

14:38 30 Mar 18

5* customer service! Recovered my father's book from an old drive, also retrieved some long forgotten about photos. Simply cant put a price on something like that.

Jarek Roover

12:21 30 Jul 18

Go there if you lost your data

Tony Cowgill

15:56 10 Apr 13

We've used Data Clinic twice now - once for my son's laptop which held all his University work and suddenly seemed to just die, that was recovered with ease. And then secondly in connection with work when our office computer system backups were somehow corrupted. These people really know their stuff - they are very helpful and professional and quick! Thanks so much for everything.

Rob Deighton

11:33 09 Dec 16

Happy to recommend Data Clinic to anybody that suffered Data Loss on storage Media. The guys were extremely helpful and knowledgeable and made the recovery of our valuable data a stress free experience.

George Thorpe

12:19 20 Feb 14

My company provides IT support to approximately 60 Yorkshire based companies ranging from small 10-15 users up to Enterprise sized organizations. Due to disk failure a client recently lost their entire database. We contacted Data Clinic and within hours a representative was onsite, several hours later the drive was returned, again in person by Data Clinic Manchester. I would not hesitate contacting them again, outstanding service in a market that can mean life or death to a business. 10 stars if there was an option!

Kieran Collins

21:02 25 Oct 18

Fantastic. Could not fault them at all, Brilliant, 10 year old iMac full of data and they had the data back to me in 72 hours. Communication via e-mail was fast, clear and superb.

David Tett

14:36 24 Aug 18

Sent them a 4tb WD Red hard drive to recover. They quoted me £588 incl VAT and recovery media. I was a bit sceptical so I asked for it to be returned. First they sent me the wrong hard drive (a 500GB WD Blue). Not too careful about data protection then. When I eventually got the drive back it had been totally stripped and outer casing binned (would have been nice to know about this beforehand). I decided to send it to Curry's PC World. They quoted £90 + recovery media. All data recovered and both hard drives returned within a week. What more is there to say.

Elle Sweet

22:12 20 Aug 18

Awful communication, I was constantly chasing them for updates on my device. My device was with them days before work was started on it. The data this company couldn’t retrieve was later retrieve by Apple. Waste of a £110.

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