Home / Hard Drive Data Recovery
When a hard drive fails, the data is usually still on the platters. What has failed is the part that reads it: the heads, the circuit board or the drive's own firmware. We repair that part far enough to make a careful copy of the drive, then hand your files back on a new one. Drop it to our staffed office in Bundall, or post it in free from anywhere in Australia.
Most of the drives we cannot recover were made worse after they failed, not by the failure itself. A failing drive has a limited number of attempts left in it. Spend none of them guessing.
A sound or a symptom does not identify the fault on its own, but it narrows it down, and it tells you how urgently the drive needs to stay switched off.
The classic sound of a drive whose heads cannot read. The arm swings out, fails to find what it expects, returns and tries again. Usually one or more failed heads, sometimes firmware. This is the drive that most needs to be switched off, because a damaged head can start scoring the platters.
The motor is trying to start but the platters will not turn. Often the heads have stuck to the platter surface, or the motor has seized, typically after a drop or a long time sitting unused. It needs to be freed in clean conditions, not by tapping it on the desk.
No spin, no sound, nothing. Usually an electronic fault on the circuit board, very often after a power surge or the wrong power adapter was plugged into an external drive. The platters are often untouched. The board can be repaired, but it carries data unique to that one drive, which is why a board from another drive will not simply work.
The drive sounds normal but does not appear, shows up with the wrong name, or reports a tiny capacity. That is usually a fault in the drive's own internal firmware, which lives partly on the platters. It is repaired with dedicated recovery hardware, not with anything that runs on a normal computer.
Folders take minutes to open, copies stall, the drive drops off and comes back. That is usually bad sectors or a weakening head, and it is the stage where careful imaging gets the most back. Stop copying files off it yourself: every retry on a bad area wears the drive down further.
Windows says the disk needs formatting, or the Mac says it is unreadable. That can be simple file system damage, or a failing head that can no longer read the drive's index. Do not format it, and do not let a repair tool loose on it until it has been tested properly.
A large share of the drives we see are portable USB drives that were knocked off a desk or unplugged mid-copy. They fail the same way as any hard drive, with a few traps of their own.
Some external drives are an ordinary drive with a small USB adaptor in the case. Many others, including a lot of Western Digital portables, have the USB connector built into the drive's own board, and many of those encrypt everything written to the platters. Prise one out of its case, or let someone fit it to a different adaptor, and the data can look like random noise. Bring it in exactly as it is.
A portable drive that falls while it is spinning very often damages its heads, and sometimes the platter surface. If it clicks or buzzes afterwards, switch it off and leave it off. These are recoverable far more often than people expect, provided nobody keeps powering them.
Larger desktop drives with a separate power pack are easy to plug into the wrong adapter from another device. The drive goes silent and sometimes there is a smell. Usually it is the board's protection circuitry that has given its life, and the data is fine.
Same process as every job we take. What changes with a hard drive is what happens on the bench.
Tell us the make, capacity, what happened and what it sounds like now. That conversation often tells us the likely fault, and whether it is worth bringing in at all. If it is, drop it to our Bundall office or post it in.
You get a confirmation once it is logged. It then goes securely to our own workshop, where the recovery equipment and donor parts are.
The board, heads and firmware are tested with dedicated recovery hardware that controls exactly what the drive is asked to do, so a weak drive is not run to destruction while we find the fault. A diagnostic fee applies to this stage and is quoted to you beforehand.
We tell you what failed, what the repair involves, what it costs, roughly how long it will take and how likely it is to get your data back. Nothing proceeds without your approval.
Whatever failed is repaired far enough to read the drive: the board and its unique data, the firmware, or the heads, which are replaced with a matched donor set under a laminar flow clean bench. The drive is then copied sector by sector to healthy media, reading the good areas first and coming back to the difficult ones, so the most data comes off in the fewest hours of a fragile drive's life.
Your files are rebuilt from the copy, never from the original, and checked before we call it done. They come back to you on a new drive, along with the old one. Allow two to three business days after payment before collection.
We do not publish a price list, because a corrupted partition and a dropped eight terabyte drive needing new heads are not the same job. What we can tell you is what moves the price, so the quote makes sense when you get it.
This is the big one. Roughly from least to most work: file system damage on a healthy drive, then firmware faults, then circuit board faults, then failed heads, then heads plus damage to the platter surface. Each step up adds bench time, and the head jobs add a donor drive.
Replacement heads have to come from a drive that matches yours closely, down to the model, the family and sometimes the factory batch. Common drives are easy. Rare or older ones can take time and cost more to source.
Capacity does not change the kind of work, but a large drive full of weak sectors takes far longer to image than a small one, and a bigger drive needs a bigger drive to return your files on.
A drive that has already been opened, run through recovery software for hours, or had a board swapped in from another drive is usually harder, and sometimes impossible. It helps to tell us everything that has been tried.
How the money works: a diagnostic fee applies, it is quoted before you commit, and it is the same figure whether the news is good or bad. After assessment you get a firm written quote. If you decide not to go ahead, the diagnostic is all you pay. If the job turns out materially bigger than the assessment showed, we call you before doing the work, not after. More on this, including why we do not advertise a free assessment or a no recovery, no fee promise, in Pricing, Plainly.
People often search for hard drive repair when what they need is their files back. The difference matters, because it changes what you should pay for.
A replacement head stack or a repaired board is there to get one careful copy off. It is not a fix you can trust with your data again. Your files come back on a new drive, and the old one should be retired or securely destroyed.
If everything on it is safely backed up somewhere else, you do not need recovery at all. Replace the drive and restore from the backup. It costs nothing to check before you call.
If it is the drive inside a laptop or desktop that has failed, bring the whole computer, or call and we will tell you whether to remove the drive. Some laptops encrypt the drive to that machine, and taking it out can do more harm than good.
Data recovery is full of big promises. Here is where the real limits are, so you can decide before you spend anything.
If a crashed head has carved rings through the surface, the data under those rings is gone, and the debris often spreads. Partial recovery from the undamaged areas is sometimes still possible. This is the outcome that switching a clicking drive off early helps avoid.
Data that has been written over, by a full format, a reinstall or months of continued use, cannot be recovered by anyone. The sooner a drive with deleted files is switched off, the better.
Some large modern drives are sealed with helium, and a small number of jobs need equipment we do not hold in house. When that happens we tell you before the drive moves to a specialist partner in our network, and you decide.
Most failed hard drives are recoverable, and we put real effort into every one. But nobody can honestly guarantee data off a drive they have not examined, and we will not either.
Did a great job recovering photos from an old Mac hard drive. These guys know their stuff and retrieved memories assumed lost for good. Happy to recommend them to anyone needing their data back.
Good communication. Had a few things go wrong along the way with hardware faults that took time, but they carried on and kept me updated as it went. All my files have been restored. Legends.
Had a great experience with my brother's corrupted hard drive. Staff were very friendly, professional, and had great communication both over the phone and in person. They do good fair work.
Rated 4.9 out of 5 from 118 Google reviews. Read them on Google
Not a spinning hard drive? SSDs, memory cards and USB sticks fail differently. See the full list of what we recover. For a dead MacBook see MacBook and Apple Data Recovery, and for phones see Phone and Tablet Data Recovery.
Tell us the make and capacity, what happened and what it sounds like now. A five minute phone call usually establishes whether your job is worth pursuing, and there is no charge for that conversation.
1, Lvl 15/2 Corporate Ct
Bundall QLD 4217
Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm
Please call before dropping in.
Tell us what happened and we will come back to you with a plain answer about whether it is worth pursuing. If it is urgent, ring us instead on 1300 532 935. A phone call is nearly always faster.
While you wait to hear back, leave the drive alone. Keep it switched off and unplugged, do not run anything on it, do not open it or take it out of its case. The condition it is in right now is the best chance you have.