The external drive is Scotland's best-loved back-up and its most-dropped unit. A portable hard drive in a plastic box that lives either on the edge of your desk or in your laptop bag. When it no longer mounts, when you drop it off the sofa or when it makes a 'clicking' noise within its casing, then we see it on our bench as one of three different patients. The look is free, as always. This covers data recovery external hard drive and data recovery external drive cases of every kind, from WD, Seagate, LaCie or Toshiba portables that are clicking, dropped or not recognised.
An external drive consists of two parts: the internal drive unit and the bridge board which converts the drive to USB. Failures in the bridge board include dead ports, snapped connectors and fried power circuits. These issues are common, and they are the better diagnosis, because the actual internal drive unit is often untouched. However, there's an important issue for DIYers to be aware of. Many external drives, such as WD My Passports and several Seagate ranges, are encrypted using hardware-based encryption located on the bridge board. If you remove the drive from the external case and plug the drive directly into your system, you will receive garbage (gibberish) instead of files. The bench decrypts the data properly via the correct decryption channel. Therefore, always obtain a quote prior to sending us your drive. Obtain a quote either over the telephone or by filling out our quotation request form. Once you have your quote, send the entire external drive whole, in its own enclosure, with its cable and power supply. If you've already separated the drive from the enclosure, send both, including the board.
Externals fail mechanically more often than internal hard drives due to one major disadvantage: they fall. An external, powered, spinning drive dropping off a table tends to damage the heads or platters at the absolute worst time, when you are actively using the drive, and the audible post-drop click is exactly the head damage it sounds like. A common story from our own postbag: an external dropped onto concrete while someone was working in the garden. If that is today's story, the basic rules are the mechanical rules: no retries, no software, get a quote first over the telephone or by submitting the form, and then send it in a padded box to South Gyle. Desktop externals and multi-bay enclosures (such as LaCie Big, WD Duo and Iomega desktop drives) have added another layer, as some stripe data across two disks as RAID 0. Therefore, if sending from a multi-bay enclosure, remove each individual disk from the enclosure and send all of the disks, labelled by bay number. A single-disk external should be sent whole, complete with its cable and power supply.
Decent odds that this will be a failure of the enclosure (bridge), since the boards and connectors on these are going to fail much more gracefully than drive components. This can lead to a favourable diagnosis and sometimes a same-week turnaround, though avoid opening the case and confirming the failure yourself, as hardware-encrypted models all go to gibberish when taken out of their own bridge board.
The classic drop injury: mechanical damage to the heads, recoverable in most cases by using donor parts and careful imaging, as long as the drive has not been restarted multiple times to test it. Each additional power-up of the drive causes the damaged heads to pass back over the surface of each platter. Switch it off. First a quote, either by phone or with the form on this website, will be given for you to consider, followed by packaging and shipping.
Yes, routinely. The hardware encryption is located on the bridge board of the enclosure, so recovery works through or around this layer as needed. In cases when the enclosure, or its board, has been separated or replaced, include the originals in the box; they can carry your data keys.
First, a free diagnostic, then a fixed written quote before any work is done. This means no surprises on the invoice (because we don't give you an invoice until you approve the number).
Examples of some of our other work from the bench that are similar to this kind of job.
It will take only two moves to place your device at our service area, and once that has been accomplished, the clock on your free look starts.
First get a quote, over the telephone or using the online quotation form. When sending your internal drive, remove all cables, caddies and power supplies, as they will have little use when sent to us. But when sending an external drive, send the complete item, including its original casing, together with the supplied cable and power supply. Ensure that the device is securely wrapped and unable to move during transportation. Either post it insured to 4 Redheughs Rigg Westpoint, South Gyle, Edinburgh EH12 9DQ or call into our offices Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, with no appointment needed. Please include a brief description of how your device was damaged. If you have printed a shipping form, please attach it along with the device.
Once the arrival of your device has been confirmed, the diagnostic will run free of charge, and then when we make the phone call to you, we'll name the problem and tell you the fixed price to fix it. The bench will remain dormant on your device until you give us permission to proceed.
£300 + VAT is the fixed cost to do this job, and you get a free diagnostic first. If it's an encrypted external hard drive, you will need to keep the board with the drive, as there may be no other method to open this unit (the bridge may be the only key).