Clicking, spinning up and stopping, detected with the wrong capacity, or dead on the bench. This page explains what a recovery laboratory means by repairing hard drives, the four repairs that genuinely happen, why a drive is never mended to be used again, and what the flat £300 + VAT single-drive band covers.
One hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT, fixed in writing before any work starts. A drive is repaired only far enough to read it — what comes back is your data on healthy storage, not a mended disk. The diagnostic beforehand is free.
People searching for hard drives repair usually have one of these six in front of them. Each points at a different failure, and the first three all get worse every time the drive is powered up.
The heads are trying to find a reference point on the surface, failing, retracting and starting over. It is the sound of a mechanism that no longer knows where it is. Every repetition drags the heads across the platters again, so the useful thing to do is unplug it now rather than record the noise for a forum.
The motor is not turning. Sometimes the spindle bearing has seized, which is common in drives that have been dropped or that sat unused for years; sometimes the heads have settled onto the platter surface and stuck there. Neither is fixed by tapping the drive on a desk, whatever the internet says.
A drive that cycles is failing its own start-up checks. It may be a head that cannot read the calibration data, a power supply that cannot hold the current, or firmware in the reserved area that has become corrupt. The cycling itself is punishing, and a dozen more attempts will not produce a different answer.
The BIOS shows a model number that is not the one on the label, a capacity of zero, or a string of question marks. That is nearly always the drive's own firmware area rather than your data. The platters are usually untouched, and the work is to get the drive answering properly again so it can be imaged.
Copying starts fine and stalls halfway; Windows hangs; the file manager greys out. This is a surface with growing unreadable regions, and the drive is spending thirty seconds retrying each one. Left running, it will keep going until the retries damage more of the surface than they rescue.
A shorted component on the circuit board, usually after a surge or a failed power supply. The platters are almost always perfect. A replacement board on its own rarely works, because modern drives keep individual tuning data in a chip on that board, and it has to travel across with the swap.
This needs saying plainly, because a lot of people arrive expecting a mended drive back in the post. A recovery laboratory does not repair hard drives to be used again. It repairs them just far enough, and for just long enough, to read the contents off onto something healthy. A drive that has been opened is finished as a working device, and even one whose board has been rebuilt should never go back into service. What you get back is your data, on new storage; what you should do with the original is have it destroyed or keep it in a drawer.
That framing decides everything else. Nobody here is trying to make a drive last another year, so nothing is bodged to keep it running. The whole effort goes into one imaging window: get the drive stable enough to read, read the readable bulk first, then go back for the awkward regions. Many drives that have been repaired in this sense survive for a handful of hours, which is ample if those hours are used properly and useless if they are spent letting Windows index the thing.
A head stack replacement is the one people picture. Heads fly a few nanometres above a surface spinning at seven thousand revolutions a minute, and when one stops flying it has to be replaced with a matched assembly from a donor drive of the same family and firmware revision. It is done in filtered air, because a speck of dust on a platter is a boulder at that scale, and the donor is the hard part — the right drive is not the same model number, it is the same model number from the same production window.
A circuit board repair is the second. Often it is a single burnt component or a fuse that did its job during a surge. Where the whole board must be replaced, the adaptive tuning stored in its ROM has to be moved onto the replacement, otherwise the drive will spin up and read nothing but nonsense, because it is being told the wrong calibration for its own heads.
Firmware work is the third and the least visible. Every drive reserves an area of the platters for its own use — defect maps, translation tables, tuning. It is not part of your capacity and you cannot see it, and when it corrupts the drive appears with the wrong identity, zero capacity or an endless busy state. Rebuilding those modules is bench work with a specialist controller, and it is a repair in the truest sense: nothing is broken mechanically at all.
A seized spindle is the fourth and the least pleasant. Freeing a stuck motor or lifting heads that have settled onto the surface means opening the drive and, in bad cases, moving the platters onto a working chassis while keeping their alignment to a fraction of a degree. Drives that have been shaken, tapped or put in a freezer first are noticeably worse candidates.
Freezing a drive is folklore. It occasionally bought a few minutes on drives built thirty years ago; on a modern one it puts condensation on the platters and inside the bearing, and everything after that is harder.
Repeatedly powering a clicking drive to see whether today is different is the most expensive habit in this trade. So is running a repair utility. CHKDSK and its relatives assume the disk beneath them is sound and will write their corrections onto a surface that is actively failing, spending your remaining read time on the wrong thing. And opening the case at home, however carefully, puts household dust between the head and the platter.
If a drive matters, the sequence is short: stop it, leave it alone, and let somebody put it on a controller that will not try to mount, index or repair anything.
One hard drive or one SSD is £300 + VAT, whether it came out of a laptop, a tower, an all-in-one or an external case, and whatever its capacity. A disk pulled from a CCTV or DVR recorder is £400 + VAT, and so is a drive carrying BitLocker or any other full-disk encryption, because both add work an ordinary drive does not have. Cards, USB sticks and pen drives are £250 + VAT. Anything with several disks in it — RAID, NAS, SAN, a server — starts at £500 + VAT and rises with the member count. Forensic work is £800 + VAT with a full written report, or £400 + VAT for a binary image with deleted files extracted and no report.
A drive encrypted by ransomware is charged as an ordinary drive at £300 + VAT. It is not forensic work and is not priced as such.
The diagnostic costs nothing and closes two working days after the drive is booked in. It tells you what has failed, what it will cost as a single fixed figure, and when it will be finished, and no work begins until you have agreed to it. A single drive is normally recovered within two to four working days of that agreement. Where a head swap needs a donor of a precise family, the wait for parts is the variable, and you are told about it rather than left wondering.
Logical recoveries carry no fix, no fee — deleted data, a formatted volume, a corrupt file system, a lost partition, ransomware. Mechanical and electronic failures do not, and neither do chip-level work, DVR jobs or forensic jobs; those four sit outside the guarantee because donor parts and bench hours are consumed whatever the result. Physical work takes half the quoted figure upfront and the balance when your files are ready.
Take the disk out and post that on its own. A laptop, a tower, an iMac or the recorder under a counter all stay where they are, and any repair shop will free a drive in a few minutes if you would rather not open the machine yourself. An external drive is the exception and travels sealed inside its own case, and a NAS travels whole with its disks in the bays. A Fusion Mac needs both drives, labelled as a pair. For a RAID or a server, send the member disks only — no chassis, no controller — each marked with its bay number.
Wrap the drive in something antistatic if you have it, then pad it until nothing moves in the box, and leave the caddy screws, cables and power bricks at home. Post it to Oxford Data Recovery, John Eccles House, Oxford Science Park, Robert Robinson Avenue, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4GP, or bring it there on a weekday between 9:00am and 5:30pm — fifty-five miles from Coventry, straight down the M40. There is no counter in Coventry and no collection round anywhere in the network. Phones and tablets are not taken at all, and storage soldered to a mainboard cannot be helped.
A drive that clicks, cycles or freezes the machine is losing readable surface each time it runs. Unplug it and let the free diagnostic look properly.
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.