Hard Disk Drive Failure

There can be many causes of hard drive failure. To successfully recover the data from a faulty hard disk drive it is first necessary to correctly diagnose the problem(s) it is suffering from and repair the hard drive.

Hard disk drive failure happens in 4 main ways:

1. MECHANICAL
Failure Symptoms:
– The hard drive may make a regular clicking noise when it is first powered on. This will last for approximately 20 seconds before the disk powers down.
– The hard drive may beep when first powered on.
– The drive will not be recognised by the computer
– Listen to an audio file of a hard disk drive with a mechanical fault
– Watch some YouTube footage of several types of hard drive failure

Causes:
– The hard drive has received a knock: for example, it may have been dropped, or if it is in a laptop, the laptop may have received a bang.
– Mechanical failure is not exclusive to hard drives receiving knocks, hard drives can fail at any time – especially the older they get.

2. LOGICAL
Failure Symptoms:
– Files and Folders will not open or have become inaccessible
– Files and Folders will not copy correctly – often CRC (Cylical Redundancy Check) errors will be reported
– Files and Folders may have been deleted or overwritten

Causes:
– Areas of the hard drive may not be readable due to the development of bad sectors.
– Data structures on the hard drive may have been corrupted due to (eg) the disk not being ejected from the system correctly.

3. ELECTRONIC
Failure Symptoms:
– The drive will not spin when it is powered on
– Sometimes the hard drive will get very hot
– It will not be recognised by the computer

Causes:
– A power surge has caused damage to the drive
– The wrong power cable has been plugged in.

4. FIRMWARE
Failure Symptoms:
– The drive will be recognised incorrectly by the computer
– Often the capacity of the drive is also reported incorrectly

Causes:
– The firmware (or ‘microcode’) that runs the drive has become corrupted. Often this is a result of software bugs that exist in the firmware.

Data Clinic’s Hard Drive Repair and Recovery Service

“Thankyou! … We made the mistake of sending our broken hard disk to [another company] and after 4 weeks theyd got nowhere. We decided to try Data Clinic because you’d been recommend. Our data was recovered in a week … we should have come to you first.” TA Print

We are able to recover data from almost ANY data loss situation.

Our data recovery service is unique: we GUARANTEE we are able to repair MORE hard disk drives and recover MORE data from MORE failures that any other UK data recovery company. We make this guarantee because we are the only UK data recovery company that has a recovery agreement with Seagate – the world’s largest manufacture of hard disks. So while other recovery companies struggle to find parts and recovery processes that work, we don’t because we have access to these parts and recovery processes already. More on why we are the best…

Regional Recovery Centres

We have offices in London (2), Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Northampton, Sheffield and Sunderland. Additionally, we have a free UK collection service. Call us now on 0871 977 2525.

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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