Whichever drive holds the only copy is the one that ends up on the floor. Portables and mains-powered units of every make arrive here clicking, beeping, blinking or dead quiet, and they go home as readable files on fresh media. There is a great deal of LaCie work on this bench in particular, so if that badge is on your case, read the section below before you try anything else.
Every external drive job is diagnosed free. One fixed figure follows in writing, agreed before a screwdriver comes out of the drawer.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Every band is listed on the data recovery cost page.
Matching the symptom to the fault underneath is the first job on any external drive, and after twenty-odd years these thirty account for very nearly everything that arrives.
The classic ending for a portable drive: heads onto platters, and every further power-up spends some of what is left. Trying it one more time gains nothing at all.
Either the bridge board, the drive electronics or the firmware has failed, while the disk inside stays perfectly healthy with nobody left to translate for it. Think of it as a vacancy, and one we can fill.
Pull a cable mid-write and the file table gets shredded, which produces exactly that prompt. The files behind it are intact. Refuse the offer and unplug the drive.
A spindle motor straining against heads that have stuck, transmitted through the case in morse. Unplug it, resist trying again, and send it in.
Bridge failure, or dead electronics on the drive itself. Imaging goes through the original board where that can be done and around it where it cannot, and the difference between those two matters more than it sounds.
WD puts the encryption in the USB board rather than in software. Drop the bare disk into a caddy and what comes back is static with filenames attached. The whole chain has to travel together, and here it does.
The power stage is where mains-powered desktop units give out. Depending on which component went, that is either the cheapest repair in the building or the most fiddly. Working out which is what the free diagnostic is for.
Spreading bad sectors turn any file copy into wading. Imaging hardware moves faster than the decline does. Trying the copy again and again feeds that decline and shortens the time available.
Deletions and formats on external drives recover well, strictly on the condition that the drive is parked at once and stays parked. Every use after the event subtracts something.
Low ground, a blocked gully and one bad night send drives here most winters. Platters take far more punishment than owners expect. They get cleaned, stabilised and, where the mechanism refuses to turn at all, transplanted in filtered air.
Knock one of Seagate's thinnest portables and it replies with clockwork clicking. Inside a case that shallow there is very little space for anything to go right. Donor stacks sit within reach of the bench.
LaCie's orange rubber does more for confidence than it does for physics. Land one badly enough and it becomes an ordinary head job wearing a very smart jacket.
Years of nightly backups loosen the micro-B port on a Canvio until it only makes contact at certain angles. Reflowed, or bypassed altogether while the imaging runs.
T7s and SanDisk Extreme portables leave electronically and never click, because there is nothing inside them capable of clicking. Flash-bench work in an external drive's clothing.
Pulling it out without ejecting works perfectly well for years, and then one day the volume will not mount at all. Put back together from one complete capture.
Iomega, Freecom and their contemporaries resurface holding the family archive. Take the shell off and inside is an ordinary mechanism our donor shelves covered years ago.
Somebody caught the lead and the port came away with it. The pads get rebuilt under magnification. Where the board is beyond helping, the bare disk comes out and is imaged directly.
Shingled recording is now standard in a great many 2.5-inch externals, and it stalls and falls off the bus partway through any large transfer. Imaged at a pace shingled media will actually tolerate.
Leave a portable drive running around the clock and it wears out years ahead of schedule, since nothing about it was designed for that. Round-the-clock duty is the job NAS drives exist for.
Tip an upright desktop unit onto its side mid-write and it collects head damage without ever leaving the desk it stands on. Filtered-air work follows. The desk carries no blame.
Some bargain portable SSDs are a cheap card behind a bridge chip in a well-finished shell. Whatever genuinely landed on the card comes back. The shell goes in the bin.
Bus power down a long lead, or through a hub with no supply of its own, browns the drive out mid-write over and over without anybody noticing. The damage accumulates, and it gets undone from a complete image.
That encryption is real, which is precisely the difficulty. With the password the work is routine. Where nobody has it, we say so at the outset instead of billing optimism by the hour.
Interrupted backups damage the bundle until restores refuse to run at all. Repairing the band files comes first, then the history gets mined for whichever versions actually matter.
A PVR loops its disk much as a CCTV recorder does, and formats it in a scheme of its own devising. The recordings get carved out of a raw image, worn sectors and all.
Shucking a cheap external case to save money is common enough. What is less well known is that certain bare disks then refuse to spin in a PC, because one pin on the SATA power connector carries a reset signal the enclosure never used. The symptom is indistinguishable from a dead drive. It is not one. Check that before concluding the worst.
Windows cannot read Apple's file systems, so it reports the disk as empty and unformatted and helpfully offers to fix that. Accept, and a new partition structure goes over a perfectly good one. Decline, and nothing at all is lost. Put the disk back on a Mac and it reads as it always did.
A drive kept on a boat, in a marina store or in a workshop off the dock road lives in damp air with a permanent background of vibration. Bearings wear from the one, connectors corrode from the other. Both tend to present themselves at about the same time, roughly three seasons in.
A standalone duplicator dock clones bay to bay at one press of a button, and nothing prevents that button being pressed with the disks the wrong way round. A blank goes straight over a full one. What survives comes down to how far the clone got before anybody noticed.
Aiming a repair utility at a disk full of bad sectors is a slow method of making things worse. It spends hours rewriting structures out of data it cannot read dependably. Send the drive exactly as it is. A repair is easy to perform on a copy and close to impossible to reverse on an original.
Most of these units spend their lives in a camera bag, a laptop sleeve or the outside pocket of a rucksack, and a fair number finish that life against a hard floor. When a platter is turning and the case lands, the heads come down onto the surface, and the tick you hear afterwards is the arm trying to find its footing again. No sound in this building is more familiar. Look past the moulded plastic on a My Passport, an Elements, a Canvio, a Seagate Expansion or One Touch, a Buffalo MiniStation, an Iomega or a LaCie, and underneath sits a plain 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch disk, so the whole drive bench applies with nothing altered. Wedding and gig photographers around Merseyside keep entire back catalogues on units like these, and each one that lands here is treated as though it holds exactly that.
So much of the search traffic reaching this page carries the LaCie name that the range has earned its own section, and its symptoms get misread more often than any other brand's. Begin with the noise. A LaCie hard drive beeping is not a unit announcing its own death. It is the spindle motor reaching for speed, failing to get there, and having another go roughly once a second. Two everyday causes cover almost all of it. The first is supply. Bus-powered 2.5-inch models, the Rugged range and the brushed aluminium Porsche Design mobile drives among them, draw everything they need through the USB port, and a worn cable, a hub with no supply of its own, or a laptop socket shared with three other things leaves the motor just short of the current it takes to spin. The second cause is physical: a spindle bearing that has stopped turning freely, or a head stack that parked itself on the platter and stuck there. A fresh cable does nothing for either. Trying over and over wastes time on the first and inflicts real damage on the second. Working out which model you are holding is straightforward enough. Orange rubber bumper, bus-powered, built to be thrown about, that is a Rugged. The Rugged SSD has no mechanism at all and goes wrong the way flash storage goes wrong rather than the way a disk does. Plain brushed aluminium and bus-powered again, that is a Porsche Design mobile. Anything with its own mains adaptor, so the d2, the d2 Professional, the 2big and the 2big Dock, belongs to the desktop half of the range, and on those a dead power brick imitates a dead drive well enough to fool most owners, which is worth testing before a parcel goes anywhere. Then comes the fact that shapes the entire job. Take the shell off a LaCie and inside is a Seagate or Toshiba mechanism like any other, the brand having sat within Seagate for years now. Out it comes, and from there it gets what any bare disk gets: donor heads where the stack has gone, motor work where a bearing has seized, a matched board carrying the original ROM, then a slow full copy under supervision. That is all LaCie data recovery amounts to once the case is open, and it explains why a job booked in as repair LaCie external hard drive hardware turns into ordinary disk work about ten minutes after the screws come out. One further piece of good news. The bridge in most LaCie enclosures passes the disk straight through without encrypting anything, making them a gentler proposition than the WD portables. The Secure models are the exception, along with any unit somebody configured using LaCie's own encryption software, and those go nowhere without the original credentials. A separate page on this site takes the Rugged, the Porsche Design, the d2 and the 2big families in turn, and it is listed with the models further down. Whatever is sitting on your desk, the price for a single external drive is £300 + VAT as soon as the fault has a name, and naming it is free.
Take the disk out of a WD portable built in the last few years, connect it to a SATA port, and what you get is random-looking rubbish. That is by design rather than by fault. Encryption on those models runs through the little USB bridge in the case, which means the bare disk carries nothing any computer can interpret on its own. A fair few of the more worried phone calls to this office begin at that exact point, part way through an experiment on the kitchen table. Here it is routine. If the original bridge still functions, it does the unscrambling. If it does not, a donor board plus a reconstructed key chain takes the job over, and the result is your folders laid out the way you left them rather than a screen of static.
An external is a bare drive in fancy dress, so the entire drive workshop applies, with the bridge and encryption specialists behind it:
The firmware bench, and the reason a drive that reports nothing can still be read. It opens service mode, rebuilds the translator, tidies the defect tables and pulls locked firmware areas back out. Downloadable software does none of this.
Head-by-head copying with the current draw monitored the whole time. Timeouts are enforced per sector and retries run in hardware, so a difficult band costs a few minutes instead of costing everything still readable.
Enclosures come apart anywhere. Drive lids come off in filtered air and nowhere else, because a speck of room dust is taller than the gap the heads fly in.
Jigs, combs and lifters to move a head stack, or an entire pack of platters, into another chassis without a single recording surface touching anything.
Held on the shelf by model, firmware family and factory code. Nearly matching is not matching, and most jobs find their donor here rather than waiting on the post.
Self-encrypting portables, WD's above all, get imaged through their own bridge board. Where that board has gone, the encryption chain is reconstructed so imaging can go ahead without it.
Interface boards kept on our own shelves and matched carefully, so a drive's encryption crosses over intact instead of leaving with the old board.
By volume of arrivals, Expansions and Passports lead, with T7-class solid state gaining a little ground each quarter. The log throws up two points worth stating. WD builds encryption into the USB board itself, which means a dead bridge obliges the whole chain to travel across together, and caddies bought in hope are wasted money. Second, a thin Seagate portable will click after almost any knock, and that follows from how little space sits between the lid and the platter. Iomega and Freecom units out of drawers undress into ordinary mechanisms our donor racks already cover: an orphaned badge outside, a routine job within. External hard drive recovery costs £300 + VAT a drive whatever name is printed on the case, naming the fault costs nothing, and the quickest finished jobs run 2-4 working days.
Iomega has no telephone number left to ring. Ownership went to EMC, from there to Lenovo, and then the name was retired, while the drives themselves keep coming out of drawers across Merseyside: brightly coloured eGo portables, desktop boxes that served a decade as the family archive, Home Media units last opened when the children still lived at home. An orphaned badge is not the same thing as an unrecoverable disk. Under the shell sits an ordinary Seagate, Samsung or WD mechanism, of a generation our donor racks have carried parts for since it was on sale, and it images along the route any drive bought this year would take. If an old enclosure will not come apart, post the lot. Opening awkward legacy cases without harming the disk inside is a decent slice of this trade.
LaCie designs for people who carry their work with them, and carrying it is exactly what wears the kit out. A Rugged that lives in a camera bag on the coast road to Crosby. A d2 under an edit desk in a Baltic Triangle studio. Both spend their lives being moved, and a spinning platter has no fondness for movement. Put a Rugged down hard with the disk turning and the heads take the consequences, orange rubber notwithstanding. The mains-powered models go a different way, losing their interface board while the disk sitting behind it remains in excellent order. With the brand now inside Seagate there is no manufacturer channel to fall back on, so the job runs through a workshop: case off, bare disk imaged, donor heads fitted where the landing demands it, and the projects handed back from the copy.
Think of a My Passport as one sealed instrument, not a disk that happens to live in a box. The USB socket is mounted on the drive controller itself, and the hardware encryption runs in that very same chip. Kill the electronics and the files stay locked exactly where they sit. Move the bare disk into a spare caddy and all you get is noise with filenames on it. Donor boards for both the WDBPKJ and the WDBYVG generations are stocked here, and fitting one carries the encryption chain over unbroken. That step alone decides whether a Passport ever appears on a computer again. My Book units follow a different script, failing usually at the power brick, then at the bridge, around a mechanism in perfectly good order.
A MiniStation picks up the whole catalogue of small portable injuries. It gets dropped, the socket loosens, and bad sectors arrive on a timetable nobody set. DriveStation units on mains power usually outlast their own power supply and interface board while the disk carries on quite happily, which is better news than it first sounds. Hardware encryption appears in a number of MiniStation variants, and where the password is known that layer gets opened during the work so the recovery reads as ordinary files. The running order never changes: case off, a complete sector image, and every step after that performed on the copy.
Almost every job on this bench came in by tracked, insured post. It is the calmest way to move a drive that is already struggling, and a parcel handed in anywhere on Merseyside usually reaches the bench the following working day.
Still screwed inside a laptop, tower, MacBook, iMac, server or a CCTV recorder? Take the drive out and post that on its own. We do not strip machines here, and any computer shop will do it in a few minutes. The one job nobody can take on is flash soldered straight to a logic board, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a handful of very slim laptops: if the storage will not unbolt, there is nothing to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Manchester Data Recovery. It is roughly 35 miles from Liverpool along the M62 if you fancy the run, and next working day by tracked post if you do not. We ring or email the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes 2 working days after that.
Not sure what belongs in the parcel? Call 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or step through the free online diagnostic first.
Diagnosis free, one figure written down, and £300 + VAT covers a single drive or SSD. Start online or ring.