Virtually all recovery companies have published versions of this same article on their websites across the UK. And most of them don’t want to tell you how much you could potentially do yourself; they want you to call them. The goal of this article is to inform you what you can really attempt to accomplish yourself, and where you’re going to hit the wall.
Almost everything you need to know about what you should do next revolves around answering that single question, and it is not a hard one to answer.
If the drive is making a noise it did not used to make (clicking, beeping, grinding) then it is a mechanical failure and there is nothing you can safely do yourself. There is no software to help. Any actions taken make things worse. Unplug it. Stop. This is not about protecting our fees. This is reality. A click from a hard drive for two minutes, versus clicks from a hard drive for two days, is a recoverable hard drive versus a partially recovered hard drive.
If the drive is silent, or sounds completely normal, then chances are you’ve got a logical issue. We provide guidance on troubleshooting to try first (with minimal risk), below.
The most typical reason people say their external hard drive is dead is because they had put a coil of cable in a rucksack four hundred times. A bad USB cable can deliver power but not data and results in a spinning drive that cannot be seen.
For a desktop drive powered by mains power. Failing external PSUs are more common than failing hard drives. Try using another with the same voltage and connector if you have another.
Connect the drive directly to a rear port, not a front panel or a hub. Next test it on a completely different computer. This will help determine if either the drive itself is faulty or simply the host (computer).
Press Windows + X. In the menu, select “Disk Management.” If you see your disk listed there but not in File Explorer, this is good news; this tells us two things. First, the hardware is working. Second, there is an issue with how the data is stored or organised (file system).
If you have a disk showing up as healthy (with a partition) but no letter assigned to it, go ahead and right click and give it a letter. Sometimes that’s all that was needed.
If none of those options work and your hard drive is silent, we’ve entered into areas of recovery which could be risky. Please read further before proceeding.
Recovery software does work, but only in certain situations. The problem is that recovery software can’t determine if your situation is one of those correct ones. It also has no way to know how long it should spend running on a disk it’s harming.
It works on: a deleted file, or an incorrectly formatted partition, or a corrupted file system, or even a wiped out partition table, on a perfectly good physical hard drive (disk).
It destroys things on: either a drive with failing heads or bad sectors. Software does not understand when a hard drive is dying. If it finds a bad sector, it tries again. And again. Until eventually, it drives a marginally good head to death, turning a recoverable hard drive into an unrecoverable one. We have seen this repeatedly, and every time the customer gives their honest account: “I let it run overnight.”
1. Never install it onto the drive you are recovering from. The installer will install hundreds of megabytes to your hard disk that has unallocated (free) space you want to keep.
2. Never write the recovered files back to the same drive. Always recover to a separate hard disk.
No. And we’re among the few who say that ‘shucking’ is a bad idea when doing diagnostics (and there are many people who say it’s a great idea).
This makes sense: an external drive is simply a regular drive with a USB bridge board attached. The boards fail more often than the drives themselves. So when you remove the drive from the case and insert it in a SATA slot, if it works, it works perfectly.
The problem is many external drives encrypt on the bridge board. WD My Passport does this by default, with no password. So most owners have no idea that it is happening. The disk holds ciphertext. The key lives on the bridge board. Remove the disk and it will spin up, be recognised at the correct capacity, and display complete gibberish, and now you think your data is destroyed (when actually it is okay), and you just took the data away from the key.
If you’ve already done this: do not throw the enclosure away. Save both parts. It’s likely the key can still be recovered off the board.
Right away.
Bad sectors are there already; your data recovery software can’t get rid of them and usually makes things worse.
Usually drives that fail while loaded.
This is the real test. If losing your data is a significant issue to you then the optimal amount of DIY attempts should be zero. Each time you attempt to recover your own lost files, you lose some of your options.
A free assessment. A fixed price of £300 + VAT for a single external drive. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data.
Get a quote from us, then drop off your drive at our Quayside reception or send it in and see if we have found anything (at no cost). The written quote will be based on the fixed bands before we start working.