Hard Drive Data Recovery
Mechanical hard drives fail in recognizable ways, and most of them are recoverable if the drive is left alone once the trouble starts.
Signs a hard drive is failing
- Clicking, grinding or beeping
- The drive spins up and then stops
- It is not detected, or shows the wrong capacity
- Files open slowly or come up corrupted
- The computer freezes when the drive is connected
What is going on inside
A hard drive reads spinning platters with heads that float a hair above the surface. When the heads wear out or touch the platter, when the motor seizes or the circuit board burns out, the drive can no longer read itself. We work on the drive with PC-3000 to get a full image of what is still readable, and then rebuild your files from that image, never from the failing drive.
Drives we work on
Laptop and desktop drives, external and portable drives, and drives pulled from NAS units and servers, from every manufacturer. We have dedicated pages for WD and Seagate drives.
Questions
My drive is clicking. Can it be recovered?
Often, yes. Clicking usually means the heads cannot read. Switch it off and do not power it up again.
The drive was dropped. Does that change things?
It can. A drop can damage the heads and the platters together. The evaluation tells us how much is readable.
Book a visit or a pickup
Call us or book online and tell us the make, the model and what is going wrong. For IT support a technician comes to your home or office. For a repair we pick the computer up from your door, fix it at our own workshop in Burbank and bring it back. We have no storefront, so there is nowhere to drop a machine off. Outside our area, you can mail it to us.