Questions and Answers on phone and hard drive data recovery
Here are some of the recent data recovery enquiries that have come into Data Clinic from customers in the UK
Hard drive not recognised
I have an external hard drive of 1TB (Western Digital My Passport Ultra 10th Anniversary Edition). Since last week it would stop being recognized by the computer every now and then. Recently, I was trying to copy all the files within the drive to another external drive to do a backup just to be safe. More or less 1/3 into the process and the hard drive stops working and is not recognized by the computer anymore (not recognized anywhere, i.e. BIOS, within the OS, device manager on Windows, etc.). The case has been opened unfortunately in a non clean room environment.
The top platter has 1 circular scratch. Is there any chance at recovery?
I tried a data recovery company but they were not successful stating that “the replacement of the read & write heads has not resulted in a successful recovery”. Is there any chance that recovery, even though partial, is still possible?
Answer: A hard drive that has a circular scratch is going to have to be recovered using our Advanced Data Recovery service.
Not Recognised Samsung Hard Drive – Nottingham
It’s a Samsung external hard drive Model HX-M500TCB/G. When I plug it into the laptop the little blue light comes on, but it does not appear as ‘findable’ on my laptop – or on my flatmates laptop either so there is definitely a problem with it, and it’s making a very quiet clicking sound when plugged in. Based in Nottingham.
Could you please let me know costs and whether you think the data might be recoverable.
Answer: Data Clinic have data recovery locations all over the country.
Phone Doesn’t Turn On
My iphone appeared with a green line so I decided to turn it off to see if just restarting it would work, but the device did not turn on again, when I connected it to the power it asked me to connect it to my laptop and from there it asked me to update or format it, but no option worked, I got the error 4013, so I contacted support and they told me that I should take it to a store, the question is that I do not have a backup, so I want to see if Someone can fix my phone without losing all my information, I have things of a lot of sentimental value, I have been in the process of looking for someone who can help me but some people only tell me that they try to fix the screen and then see if they can with the information, that is not It is useful for me because I can request another phone through insurance, the most important thing is the information, I have also contacted them hoping to find a more favorable option in terms of price, already I found a company but at a price that I cannot pay because at this moment I was fired from a job so I want to use my savings and exhaust possibilities to recover my information, thank you very much dataclinic and I await your prompt response
Answer: You can read all about iPhone data recovery here.
Disk Not Initiated
The hard drive spins up, and does not make any concerning noises one would usually assume with a physically damaged drive. The drive would not boot an operating system. When inserted into a SATA docking station, Windows Disk Management does not recognise the drive’s capacity or any active partitions, (No mention of NTFS/FAT32, MBR/GPT etc) It simply displays “Disk Not Initiated” – upon attempting to initialise the disk, it fails and says “Data Error, Cyclic Redundancy Check“. Whilst i’ve got a back up of some of the files that were on the disc, there are some that I don’t have which I may require. Could you tell me if it’s possible to repair or recover the data from this device and if so, an approximate cost.
Answer: Disk Not Initiated or Disk Not Initialised errors are produced by the computer when there is a serious problem with the hard drive. Nothing else to do with the computer is at fault – ie. it’s not going to the anything else, the problem is to do with the hard drive. There are many reasons you might see this error – for further information take a look at our hard drive recovery page.