This badge fails along lines of its own. A private firmware region that gives way and takes a healthy disk off the bus. Overlapped write tracks that quietly consume a deleted folder. An external whose board has died in front of a mechanism that is perfectly sound. The ranges, the makes Seagate absorbed and the honest limits are all below, and one drive is £300 + VAT after a free examination.
A single Seagate disk is £300 + VAT, and nobody pays for the examination that comes first. A BarraCuda out of a tower, a lone IronWolf, a FireCuda, an external Expansion — one band. Recorder disks are £400 + VAT, and a full set of members opens at £500 + VAT.
It leads the page because it is the one fault on this badge that throws data away for no reason at all. Every hard disk reserves a private region of its own platters that no operating system ever sees, and keeps in it the things it needs in order to be itself: a translator converting the addresses a computer asks for into real positions on the surface, a running list of sectors it has already given up on, calibration figures for each head, and its own name and capacity. Damage any of that and nothing reports an error, because the part that would have raised one is the part that has failed.
From a desk it looks exactly like a dead drive. It spins, it sounds the way it always has, and the machine behaves as though the cable were unplugged. Sometimes it turns up with a capacity of zero, or a fraction of the real size, or a model string of scrambled characters. This manufacturer produces more of that than any other, which is why so many Seagates end up in a drawer, or a skip, with every file on them intact.
Getting one back means ignoring the operating system entirely, talking to the disk through its own diagnostic interface, mending or stepping around whatever is corrupt, and only then taking an ordinary image of the surfaces. Few jobs in the building are more satisfying, because nothing is physically wrong with the thing: platters untouched, no filtered air needed, no donor mechanism to chase, and as a rule the whole contents come home. It is also logical work rather than electronic or mechanical, so it falls inside no fix, no fee.
What turns it awkward is what people do first. A disk that has had several rounds of a repair utility thrown at it, or one of the reset scripts that circulate on forums, is a harder job than it was, because all of those write. So the instruction is short: a Seagate that has vanished but is still turning gets switched off and left off. HDD recovery covers the same ground across every other manufacturer, and hard drive recovery holds the flat single-disk band.
The catalogue runs from the BarraCuda under a kitchen desk to the Exos disks in a data centre rack, and the ways out repeat often enough to be worth setting down. The two at the top are the ones people most often read as a dead drive, which is why they go there.
Power reaches it, the motor comes up, the machine behaves as though nothing were connected. On this maker that points at the reserved firmware region rather than at the platters more often than on any other badge. A genuine fault, repairable through the drive's own diagnostic interface, and frequently not a single file lost.
Zero bytes, a tenth of what it ought to be, or a model field full of symbols. Each of those is the same kind of firmware damage wearing a different mask, and the surfaces underneath are typically in good order. Reaching for a repair utility is the wrong instinct here: those write, and the disk has not lost anything yet.
Heads that have lost track of where they are, after a knock or simply after a very long service life. Each restart from here takes away more surface. Cut the power and leave it dead. Freezer tricks and a smart tap on the casing belong to folklore, and both have turned recoverable disks into scrap.
Typically an external unplugged during a copy, or a machine that lost power with a write in flight. What has been damaged is the partition entry or the file table, and the dialogue on screen proposes the one action guaranteed to make matters worse. Decline it, pull the lead out, and let no repair utility near it while the files are still lying where they were written.
Motor noise, a click, quiet, and the whole sequence repeating ten seconds later. On a mains-powered desktop unit the supply and the board account for a large share of these; on a bus-powered portable either the electronics or the mechanism can produce it. None of that can be settled by ear through a wall, which is precisely what the free examination is for.
A transfer that runs correctly and then falls to almost nothing is either meeting sectors the drive keeps retrying, or is one of the overlapped-track consumer models with a full staging area, reorganising itself while you wait. Both want imaging equipment that sets its own timeouts, rather than a file manager and a hopeful evening.
Ranges here are named rather than coloured, and the name is decent shorthand for the workload a disk has carried. Four years of accepting camera streams leaves a drive in a different state from four years under a desk holding a music collection, and the bench finds the difference.
The desktop and notebook workhorse, and the badge that heads the booking sheet. One thing about it is worth knowing before anything else: a great many consumer models, the popular 2TB sizes especially, lay their tracks overlapping. Those take far longer to copy, and once something has been deleted from one the clock is running.
Two products sharing a name. The older hybrids carry a small flash cache soldered to the same board as the disk electronics, so it is not a separate device anybody can read on its own and it may be holding your most recent writes at the moment the board dies. Everything sold as FireCuda now is an NVMe blade and belongs on the flash bench.
Made for units that never switch off: vibration sensors, a duty rating to match, and usually bought as a matched batch of four or six. A single one is £300 + VAT. Where a whole set arrives from a box that has lost its volume, it is a reconstruction from £500 + VAT, priced on how many members there are.
Recorder duty. These take several video streams at once and are tuned to keep writing rather than stop over a difficult sector, so they turn up worn rather than broken. A disk out of any DVR or NVR sits in the £400 + VAT band, and recorder jobs are among the four things the guarantee has never covered.
Enterprise capacity, often on SAS connectors, and they almost never appear singly. A shelf of them is a reconstruction rather than a read. Two facts count for more than any account of the symptoms: which bay held which disk, and what the controller had been doing in the minutes before everything stopped.
The external shelf: a standard mechanism, a plastic case and a small board turning USB into SATA. When one stops, the disk is a slightly likelier culprit than the electronics in front of it. Send the unit sealed as it stands, since the case and board are part of what gets tested, and it remains one drive at £300 + VAT.
Maxtor went to Seagate in 2006, having itself absorbed Quantum's disk business five years earlier. The Samsung hard disk operation followed in 2011, which is why a spinning SpinPoint is handled here as a Seagate — Samsung's solid state drives are a completely separate line with nothing to do with any of it. LaCie has been part of the same group since 2012, and taking the aluminium off a Rugged or a d2 normally reveals a Seagate mechanism inside. There is a page here for that range on its own — the beeping units, the rubber-cased Rugged, the desktop towers — at LaCie recovery.
The consequence that matters is not sentimental, it is a supply chain. A DiamondMax or a SpinPoint F3 belongs to a line nobody has made a spare part for in well over a decade, and a mechanical repair needs a donor matched by family and firmware revision. Those shelves get thinner every year. An old disk that is merely tired can still be imaged end to end today and may be a waiting job in two years, so a drive found in a loft in Bedworth with twenty years of family photographs on it is worth sending while there is still something to match it with.
Age itself has never been the obstacle. Drives with IDE ribbon connectors, drives with jumper blocks, drives predating any file system in current use — all of them read on the right adapter, and a surprising number of them start first time. What kills an old disk is being left plugged in and retried for a fortnight by somebody hoping it will come good, or being opened at a kitchen table by somebody who read that it might.
A number of Seagate lines are sold with the maker's own recovery cover bundled in for a set number of years, the professional network drives and several external families among them. Where a drive is still inside that period and the cover was registered when it was bought, use it: the money has already changed hands. Digging out the original order confirmation is ten minutes well spent before anybody at all is rung, this bench included. Where the cover lapsed, went unregistered or never applied to that model, the bands further down are what you are looking at.
Once firmware is out of the way, the next most common arrival has dead electronics behind it, generally after a surge through a tired mains supply or an ill-matched adaptor on an external unit. Boards are replaceable. What does not work is the popular version of that idea — finding the same part number online and screwing it on — and a discouraging share of the drives reaching this bench have already been through it. The electronics hold tuning figures belonging to one particular mechanism, and unless those figures come across with the board, the disk cannot read its own surfaces. Sometimes they sit in a small chip that can be moved by hand. Sometimes they are inside the main processor, which turns a five-minute swap into a long job with a microscope in it. That is chip-level work, one of the four things the guarantee has never covered, quoted with half payable before it starts; hard drive repair takes the electronic and mechanical routes apart properly.
Laying each track partly over its neighbour lets a maker fit more onto the same platter. Read such a disk and nothing seems unusual. Change something in the middle of a band, though, and the drive has to lift and rewrite the entire band, which it does in the background through a small conventional staging area. Consumer BarraCudas in both sizes have been built this way for years, and two things follow for anybody who has just lost a folder.
Copying one is slow and cannot be hurried, so allow a day and a half for 2TB where a conventional disk would be finished in an afternoon. The second point is the one that decides outcomes. Once a file is deleted or a volume formatted, those bands count as free, and the drive is entitled to rewrite them during its own tidying — which destroys the old contents rather than leaving them waiting to be found. Deleted data on an ordinary disk sits still. On this kind it is being consumed while the drive idles and nobody touches it. Unplug a wrongly formatted BarraCuda inside the hour. Deleted file recovery sets out what tends to survive, and data after a Windows reinstall covers a fresh installation landing on the same volume.
A booked-in disk goes onto imaging hardware that decides for itself how long to wait for an answer and moves past a stubborn region rather than sitting on it, and where the state of the drive justifies it the surfaces are assessed one head at a time. The report lands on the second working day. It names the layer that failed, gives a realistic account of how much of the disk can be read, and puts a price against the work. That price is written down and it is the price. Where the sensible advice is to stop, the report says so, and the postage in is the whole of your outlay.
Logical faults are worked on a copy: your drive is read once and left alone afterwards. Mechanical faults mean filtered air, a head stack matched by model and firmware family out of stock held here, one supervised pass and then retirement for the original. Firmware repairs need nothing opened at all, because the route in is the drive's own diagnostic port. Whatever comes back is written to fresh media, and your drive is either posted home or destroyed securely, whichever you asked for in writing.
Nothing reaches beneath something that has been overwritten. A full format, an operating system installed on top, or a fortnight of ordinary use after the files went, all put new data into the space that would have been searched. An overlapped-track model formatted last month and left running has been doing exactly that to itself ever since. A disk opened outside a clean-air bench has generally taken in the dust that ends it. Deleted files on a working FireCuda blade, as on any healthy solid state drive, are usually beyond reach because the controller clears freed blocks by itself within minutes — SSD recovery draws that line exactly. Phones and tablets are not accepted here in any condition.
A single Seagate disk or solid state drive, NVMe blades included, is £300 + VAT, and an external unit counts as one drive. Cards, pen drives and USB sticks are £250 + VAT. A disk out of a video recorder is £400 + VAT, and so is an encrypted volume where the key or password still exists. Anything with several disks behind it — an IronWolf set, a shelf of Exos — starts at £500 + VAT and climbs with the member count. Logical work carries no fix, no fee. Four things sit outside that guarantee: electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs, each taking half the figure in advance, because a donor is bought for your drive and no other. Once a quote is approved, a single-drive job usually finishes within 2 to 4 working days. The full list, VAT itemised, is on the price page.
Getting it here is the simplest part of the business: fifty-five miles of M40, an hour or so, and reception signs devices in Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. Most arrive by tracked post regardless — a BarraCuda out of a home tower in Canley, an IronWolf set from an engineering firm between Nuneaton and Rugby, a SkyHawk lifted from a recorder in a unit off the M69, a Backup Plus holding a decade of photographs from a house in Kenilworth. Nobody collects and Coventry has no counter. Western Digital on the lid instead? That page covers what differs. Enclosure detail sits on external drive recovery, and the checks worth doing first on an external drive that is not working.
More Seagates arrive here with firmware trouble than with broken mechanisms, and firmware normally gives everything back. Leave it switched off and let the free examination say which you are holding.
Branded drives reach this bench in the post far more often than by hand. A padded, tracked, insured parcel is a gentler ride for hardware that has already stopped behaving than a footwell on the ring road, and it costs a few pounds. If you would rather deliver it, Coventry to Oxford is about fifty-five miles of M40 and roughly an hour; posted on a Tuesday, a drive is normally logged in on the Wednesday.
Two shapes of drive, two different instructions. A disk unbolted from a tower, a laptop or a recorder travels on its own — the machine stays with you, nothing is dismantled at this end, and any repair shop in the city will free a drive in a few minutes. An external unit in its own case is the opposite: it travels whole and sealed, screws untouched, because the board in front of the disk is one of the things being tested. A NAS goes as a complete box with its disks in their bays, while a RAID set or a server sends its member disks only, each marked with the bay it came out of. Storage soldered flat to a mainboard is the one situation with no way round it, and there is nothing to post.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Put Oxford Data Recovery on the label. Driving it down is perfectly reasonable — fifty-five miles of M40 out of Coventry, an hour on a normal morning, parking at the door. However it arrives, you hear from the bench on the day it is logged, and the written figure lands two working days later.
Unsure which of those two shapes yours counts as? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal the box, or let the free online diagnostic ask the questions for you.