Damaged Hard Drives and Phones - Questions and Answers

Three common questions in this latest post:

Hard Drive Evaluation

Question: We are an I.T support company, one of our clients gave us an external hard drive that needs recovering.
do you offer a free evaluation service? i only ask as i will need to provide the client with a quotation before agreeing to have the data recovered etc.

Answer: Yes, Data Clinic do offer a free evaluation service: we will examine the hard drive, find the fault and provide a cost for the data recovery. It’s then up to you (or your customer) if you want to proceed. Hard drives that have been opened or had recovery attempts made by other companies are not eligible for the free evaluation, in these cases a cost of £95+vat is charged for the evaluation.

Cracked Phone Screen

Question: I have an iPhone 5s which has a cracked screen due to drop damage. The battery of the iPhone was slowly getting worse a few months ago and one night it suddenly would not turn on at all. I have years worth of photos videos and contacts that I would like to recover from the phone.
and…
My phone is dead and the local repair shops are not able to fix it. my problem is i want to recover this data from my phone. Is it possible for you to do it? Please email me because my phone is dead hence i cant receive calls.

Answer: This is a typical type of phone problem that we are often asked to recover the data from. The good news is it’s usually always possible to retrieve the information from a phone that has been dropped / has a cracked screen / has battery problems. We can’t say it’s always possible though as the amount of damage is different for all phones. Take advantage of our free evaluation service (see above) and we’ll look at your phone and give you a cost for the recovery of it’s data. Read more details about phone data recovery service.

Can’t Copy Data From Hard Drive

Question: I have a 2012 MacBook Pro whose hard drive stopped mounting suddenly. I had not dropped or spilt liquid on it and am told that this is a common problem with my model.
Using an external hard drive, I have been able to see that all the files are still in place and some are even accessible. However, the old drive will not let me copy anything over to a new drive.
Apple’s technicians (Amsys) have checked the cables and tried to recover the data themselves with basic software but tell me they have been unable to do so. Could you please let me know whether you would be able to copy the old data over to a new hard drive and how much this might cost? I am not in a rush so happy to wait longer and pay less.

Answer: Your hard drive has either bad sectors or a week head, that’s what the symptoms you describe tell me. In both cases, rescuing the data from the hard drive requires a hardware approach. Use of software will make the problem worse and make well jeopardize any future attempts to recover the data. Switch the hard drive off immediately and take it into one of our local data recovery centres where we should be able to retrieve the files and folders on it for you. Data Clinic have locations all around the UK including in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool – click the link above for the full list.

data recovery, phone recovery

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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