Portable and desktop external drives fail in two quite different places: the disk inside, or the little board that turns USB into something a disk understands. This page explains how to tell them apart before anything is opened, why the enclosure travels whole, what to try at home and where to stop, and what the £300 + VAT single-drive band covers.
An external drive is one disk: £300 + VAT, whether the fault is the case or the drive inside it. Send it sealed and whole — the board in the enclosure is part of the diagnosis. Two or more disks in one unit is the array band, from £500 + VAT.
Roughly half the external drives that come in have a working disk inside a case that has stopped talking, so it is worth knowing which half you are in before anything is opened.
No drive letter, nothing in Disk Management, nothing in Disk Utility, but the drive spins and feels alive. That pattern points at the USB bridge inside the case rather than the disk itself. Try a different lead and a different port first, because a worn micro-USB socket accounts for a good share of these.
The unit appears, gets a letter, and immediately asks to be formatted before use. Say no. The partition table or the file system header has been damaged, usually by being unplugged mid-write or by a power cut, and the files behind it are typically intact and readable once the structure is rebuilt on a copy.
A portable drive falling off a desk while the platters are spinning is the classic head crash. It may click, it may be silent, and it will not improve with another attempt. Note the drop when you send it, because it changes what the bench does first and it is worth being honest about.
The three-and-a-half inch units that need their own mains adaptor fail at the adaptor far more often than at the disk. Before assuming the worst, check the supply with a known-good one of the same voltage and polarity. Feeding an external drive the wrong adaptor is a fast way to turn a healthy disk into a board repair.
Beeping usually means the motor is trying to start and cannot, often because the drive is bus powered and the port is not giving it enough current, and sometimes because the spindle has seized. A powered hub is worth one attempt. Clicking is mechanical and is not worth any attempts at all.
The volume mounts, the capacity looks right, and the contents are missing or shown as shortcuts. That is a damaged directory structure rather than a damaged disk, and it is often the aftermath of a failed copy, a virus or an interrupted backup. The data is normally still on the platters, unindexed.
Every portable and desktop external drive is a standard hard disk with a small board between it and the USB socket. That board converts USB into the language the disk speaks, provides power on the desktop units, and on many models does a good deal more besides. Because there are two components, there are two things that can fail, and they fail in ways that look identical from the outside: a dead case and a dead disk both give you a drive that does not appear.
Telling them apart matters because the outcomes are so different. A failed translator with a healthy disk behind it is one of the more straightforward jobs on the bench. A failed disk is the same work as any internal drive, which may mean a head replacement, a board rebuild or firmware repair. The diagnostic separates the two, and it costs nothing, which is the main argument against guessing.
There is a further wrinkle worth knowing. A number of external ranges encrypt everything in hardware on that little board, without ever telling the owner, so the bare disk taken out of the case is unreadable on its own even though it is perfectly healthy. That is exactly why an external drive travels here whole and sealed in its own enclosure rather than being opened up on a kitchen table — the case is part of the job, and Oxford's shipping form says so.
Portable drives live badly. They are carried in bags, unplugged while they are still writing, run bus powered from ports that cannot quite supply them, and left on windowsills and radiators. The two-and-a-half inch units inside them are laptop drives, built to laptop tolerances, and the enclosure gives them almost no cooling.
The habits that shorten their lives are all avoidable. Pulling the cable without ejecting first leaves the file system half written, which is where most format prompts come from. Running one from an unpowered hub alongside three other devices browns out the motor at spin-up. Leaving one permanently plugged in and spinning as a backup target means it has done as many hours as the computer, and nobody thinks of it as a drive that ages.
The other trap is treating the external as the backup. A single external drive holding the only copy of anything is not a backup, it is a second single point of failure with a longer cable, and it is the most common story behind these enquiries: the photographs were moved off the laptop to free up space, and the drive they were moved to is the one on the bench.
Two changes are worth making and both are free. Swap the cable for a known-good one, then try a different machine, ideally one running a different operating system, because a drive invisible to Windows sometimes shows up perfectly in Disk Utility on a Mac. For a desktop unit, try another matching mains adaptor.
Stop at the point where anything wants to write. Do not initialise the disk when Windows offers to. Do not assign a partition or run a repair. Do not let a recovery tool save its results back onto the drive it is reading. And if the unit is making a mechanical noise, none of the above applies — turn it off, because every further minute is spent grinding away the surface holding your files.
An external drive is one disk, so it sits in the single-drive band at £300 + VAT, whether the fault turned out to be the case or the disk. There is no separate charge for a bridge failure and no scale by capacity. A multi-bay desktop unit is a different thing: two disks or more is the array band, from £500 + VAT, rising with the number of members.
The remaining bands, for completeness: memory cards, USB sticks and pen drives £250 + VAT; CCTV and DVR recorder disks £400 + VAT, as are BitLocker and other encrypted volumes; forensic investigation with a written report £800 + VAT, or a binary image with deleted-file extraction and no report £400 + VAT. Ransomware on an external drive is priced as an ordinary drive.
Logical work — a format prompt, a lost partition, deleted folders, a corrupt file system, a dead bridge with a sound disk behind it — carries no fix, no fee. The published exclusions are electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs, and physical work takes fifty per cent of the agreed figure upfront. The diagnostic is free in every case and finishes two working days after the unit is booked in; a single external drive is usually recovered inside two to four working days after that.
Send the whole thing, sealed, exactly as it is. Do not prise the case apart to get at the disk, because the board inside is part of the diagnosis and on some models part of the encryption. Leave the mains adaptor and the USB lead at home unless the unit takes an unusual supply, in which case say so in the note.
Pad it well. These units are already fragile and the platters inside a dropped drive do not need a second impact in transit. Add a line about what happened — dropped, unplugged mid-copy, stopped being recognised, started clicking — because the history genuinely changes the order of work at the far end.
The address is Oxford Data Recovery, John Eccles House, Oxford Science Park, Robert Robinson Avenue, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4GP. Drop-offs are welcome there on weekdays from 9:00am to 5:30pm, and it is about an hour from Coventry down the M40 if you would rather hand it over than post it. Nobody collects, and there is no Coventry address to visit.
Portable drives arrive from every direction: a photographer in Leamington whose whole catalogue lived on one bus-powered disk, a joiner in Bedworth with the invoicing on a drive that was dropped in a van, a research student between Warwick and Coventry universities whose fieldwork sat on the drive that now asks to be formatted, a small firm on one of the Rugby estates using an external as the entire backup regime. The pattern almost never varies: one copy, one drive, and it is this one.
A unit that spins but never appears is often a failed USB bridge with a perfectly healthy drive behind it. The free diagnostic settles which it is.
One drive in a padded box is the easiest parcel there is, and it is how most of this work turns up. A disk that has already begun to misbehave would far rather be still and wrapped than rattling about in a rucksack, and something posted from Warwickshire before the last collection is generally on the Oxford bench first thing.
As a rule the storage comes out and the machine stays where it is. That applies to a laptop, a tower, an iMac and to the recorder sitting under a counter. Taking equipment apart is not something this bench does, and a repair shop will free a drive in a few minutes. Two things go the other way: an external drive stays sealed inside its own case, and a NAS travels as a complete unit with its disks still in their bays. A Fusion Mac is a third case — both of its drives come out and travel together, each one labelled. The single situation nobody can work around is memory soldered flat onto a mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon Macs and a good many slim laptops are built: if the storage will not unbolt, there is no parcel to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Put Oxford Data Recovery on the label. From Coventry it is roughly fifty-five miles straight down the M40, about an hour if you would rather drive it in than post it. Either way you are told the moment it is logged, and the free diagnostic finishes two working days later.
Unsure what ought to go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it do the asking.