Hard Drive Data Recovery in London

Hard drives fail in two ways: logically, where the drive works but the data cannot be reached, and physically, where a component inside the drive has failed. Data Retrieval Ltd handles both, from a simple deleted-files case to a 30TB helium drive with failed heads.

Choose your drive brand above, or read on to find out what may be wrong with your drive.

Logical Hard Drive Recovery

Logical recovery is needed when the drive is mechanically sound but data cannot be accessed – after accidental deletion, formatting, partition loss, malware, ransomware or operating system corruption. We create a complete image of the drive first and work only from that copy, so the original is never put at risk.

Physical Hard Drive Recovery

Physical failures include head crashes, seized spindle motors, damaged circuit boards and firmware corruption. They usually show up as clicking, beeping, buzzing, a drive that does not spin, or a drive the computer cannot detect. We carry out head and motor work in our cleanroom using matched donor parts, repair firmware with PC-3000, and then image the drive at low stress.

Fire, Flood and Power-Surge Damage

Drives exposed to water, smoke, fire or a power surge need to be cleaned and assessed before they are ever powered on. Please do not dry, heat or test a water-damaged drive – seal it in a plastic bag and bring it to us.

Brands and Models We Recover

Brand	Ranges
Seagate	Barracuda, FireCuda, IronWolf / IronWolf Pro, Exos X, Exos M (HAMR), SkyHawk, One Touch, Expansion. More »
Western Digital	Blue, Black, Red / Red Plus / Red Pro, Purple, Gold, Ultrastar, My Passport, Elements, My Book. More »
Toshiba	Canvio, P300, X300, N300, S300, MQ laptop drives, MG enterprise drives. More »
Hitachi / HGST	Deskstar, Travelstar, Ultrastar. More »
LaCie	Rugged, Mobile Drive, d2, 2big / 6big / 12big RAID. More »
Samsung	SpinPoint and Samsung external drives. More »
Legacy brands	Fujitsu, IBM, Quantum and Maxtor, Conner, G-Technology.
SSDs	Samsung, Crucial, Kingston, SanDisk, WD and all NVMe drives – see SSD recovery.

Before you send your device – five things to avoid

• Switch the device off and leave it off – every power cycle can make physical damage worse
• Do not run CHKDSK, Disk First Aid, fsck or recovery software on a drive that clicks, beeps or is slow
• Do not open the drive or swap the circuit board – modern boards hold drive-specific adaptive data
• Do not reinstall the operating system or initialise the disk when prompted
• Keep liquid-damaged devices unpowered and bring them in as quickly as possible