External / USB / Portable Hard Drive Repair and Recovery

Need To Recover Data From An External USB Portable Hard Disk ?

External (USB) or portable hard drives consist of a case containing a standard hard disk with a USB interface adaptor. Thus, these units are prone to all the usual problems relating to hard drives plus some others that the external case and interface may bring. External portable hard drives are often dropped or knocked over, this invariably causes a mechanical fault of some kind and results in the hard drive making a buzzing or ticking noise when it is next powered on. Recovering the data from external hard drives with faults like this is possible once the exact fault has been determined and the hard drive has been correctly repaired.

Supported Manufacturers:

• Western Digital (eg. MyPassport, Elements, MyBook, Slim, Ultra, Blue, Green, Red, Black)
• Seagate (eg. Barracuda, Expansion, FreeAgent, Backup Plus, Firecuda, Ironwolf)
• Toshiba (eg. Canvio Basics, P300, STOR.E)
• Samsung
• ADATA
• LaCie (eg. Rugged, Mobile Disk, D2, Big Disk, Bigger Disk, Bigger Disk Extreme, Quadra etc)
• Iomega
• Freecom
• Maxtor (eg. OneTouch)
• All types of ”Rugged” external hard drive

Data Clinic are able to repair and recover data from any type of external portable USB hard drive.

Common External Hard Drive Failure Symptoms

• The drive makes a buzzing / clicking / beeping noise when powered on: This is due to damage of the drive’s read / write heads. Usually caused by an impact such as the drive being dropped, but can happen due to imperfect manufacture or old age. Most of the time the drive is no longer recognised by the computer.
  The data is recoverable, but the drive has physical damage ie. a hardware fault. Don’t try running software to fix the problem, you’ll be wasting your time and will damage the drive further.
• The drive is silent and not recognised when powered on: Again this could be due to a failure of the read / write heads (see above), but may also indicate damage to the drive’s firmware (the programming that runs the drive), or an electrical problem.
  The data is recoverable, but the drive most probably has physical damage so running recovery software is pointless and may cause further damage.
• The drive runs extremely slowly and takes a long time to load: This is indicative of weak read / write heads and / or bad sectors on the hard drive. The data is recoverable but you should stop using the drive immediately. This is a physical problem. Under no circumstances should you allow drive repair / recovery software to run as it will try to use a software approach to fix a physical problem, which it obviously can’t do.