In-depth write-ups of real data recoveries we’ve carried out in Belfast — the fault, the diagnosis, the technique and the outcome, across hard drives, SSDs, RAID, NAS and more. Every job is diagnosed and recovered in-house. Names and identifying details are kept confidential.
The drive beeped; her CentOS machine showed nothing at all while a Windows 10 box saw the device but couldn't recognise its NTFS filesystem.
Almost everything on the dropped Passport was safely backed up elsewhere.
The USB enclosure introduced itself to Windows politely; the 500GB drive behind it never did — clicking briefly on connection, then going quiet.
The complaint in this enquiry deserves a straight answer, because half the country shares it.
The light flashed, the eject menu knew the drive's name, and nothing else worked.
By the time this enquiry arrived, the drive had a longer case history than most patients ever accumulate. The fall: from a bed to the floor, back in mid-2020.
The cruellest symptom pattern in portable-drive failure is the one that looks almost fine.
The enquiry ended with two sentences that deserve to be answered in public, because everyone thinks them and few say them.
The confession came pre-written: the drive died in a fall years back, he opened it himself with no joy.
Visiting the UK on an academic trip with days left, his 2TB drive appeared in Disk Utility but couldn't be selected.
Her dropped drive got the best version of a shop visit: an accurate diagnosis, an honest limit, and a referral onward.
His girlfriend's drive fell off the table; on reconnection it clicked a couple of times and he unplugged it straight away.
Thousands of miles away, his portable drive developed the clicking fault, and attempts to sort it locally went nowhere.
One crashed file operation and the £70 SanDisk presents as an empty socket: no partitions, no media, nothing for any software to even scan.
No clicks, no crunches — a normal-sounding four-year-old Passport that serves most of its contents and freezes the computer on the rest.
The day after a big backup session, the drive was dead: a few beeps, a steady light, a half-presence in Device Manager.
He'd been admirably thorough — four PCs, free software, careful observation.
His observation was forensic: the bad-block error mid-backup, the spin-then-quiet-stop, the metronome blink, and Windows' strangest rejection message.
Whirr, stop, slow blink, invisible even to System Information — and he'd watched this exact film before with an earlier drive.
The physics in this enquiry hides inside its most reassuring sentence. His Seagate 2TB external was plugged into the laptop and working.
She first enquired years ago and never quite made it in — no judgement; the shelf is free.
Both drives went down in the same accident and now perform the same failed start-up: spin, click, stop.
His theory was specific and hard on himself: the disk was pulled while still being read, and now no computer on either platform will acknowledge it exists.
The editing PC's drive had been opening files slowly and dragging the whole boot for weeks.
No drop, no event — the portable drive simply clicked, stopped, and went silent.
Her childhood photos and videos live on a Passport that beeps, appears in settings, and errors with its original cable.
A drive that had merely become inaccessible — likely a repairable filesystem fault.
Never dropped, cable swapped and eliminated, and still she reached for an explanation — a jostle, something, anything.
An early WD Elements desktop unit, dropped long ago, holding old family photos and music.
Nudged while running bare on the desk, the drive now spins, sweeps its heads once, beeps, and parks.
A 2003 Western Digital IDE drive from a failed LaCie enclosure, tested in two caddies with one result: heat and nothing else.
After the drop, the damage you could see was all on the outside — the enclosure took the visible hit, the drive inside looked untouched.
The light was on, she could hear it running, the eject menu listed it, and Properties offered its bland reassurance.
He assumed mechanical failure (correctly), tested exactly once (perfectly), and asked the three questions in the right order.
The update broke his graphics compatibility, forced a reinstall, and when the dust settled his old storage drive had vanished from Explorer.
A parked drive falling is bad; a running drive falling is worse, because its heads are airborne over the platters when it lands.
New MacBook, a drive that mounted twice then stopped, no clicking, and an unlock that succeeds on three machines while the volume never arrives.
When he plugged the Passport in, nothing happened — so he worked the ladder.
Beeping and whirring, boot loops through Windows recovery, then a machine that came back without its drive — and silence where the noise had been.
The drive drowned its machine in retries for a week, took a disk check as its final workout, and vanished from the BIOS.
The Passport's light comes on and it beeps when plugged in, but Device Manager and Disk Management list nothing.
He runs the WD 1TB as a bare drive in a USB enclosure — and now the connection chime sounds, This PC shows nothing, and clicking comes from inside.
His enquiry documented, in one honest paragraph, the exact descent this archive spends hundreds of pages trying to interrupt.
" His ask was equally practical: could he bring it in, to see if recovery is possible and get an approximate cost?
Fifty centimetres was all it took: the drive stopped functioning, ticks on every connection, and some PCs chime without ever granting access.
A methodically structured enquiry: three partitions on a 2TB portable, one no longer mounting.
He knew his drive's habits — the usual flicker of its activity light — and reported the change precisely: solid now, not flashing.
The troubleshooting log in this enquiry was thorough, escalating, and — by a mercy this page must explain rather than rely on — entirely unsuccessful.
The ten-year-old drive failed, then granted one twenty-minute session that yielded nothing before closing forever.
The computer wouldn't start at all until one drive was unplugged; on power the 8TB span up fine but the heads could be heard seeking over and over.
Two years of perfect service, one house move, and then the fatal-device-hardware-error message on a drive that powered up but wouldn't initialise.
Not a boot hang — a total refusal: SATA-connect the drive and the computer won't turn on at all; through a USB converter it's simply undetected.
He supplied everything: lifetime reads and writes, power-on hours, an annualised workload figure that told the whole story, and failed vendor diagnostics.
The drive was practically new, had taken several transfers happily, and then produced the full classic.
The 2TB Barracuda starts confidently and then falls into a tick, never reaching File Explorer — a model whose habits this bench has catalogued for a decade.
Few error messages send more people to a search engine than this one, and few searches return more dangerous advice.
After a house move his LaCie would enumerate but not open; swapping the extension lead for a wall socket visibly improved things.
He'd already removed the drive, named the fault himself, supplied his own destination drive, and even said the original needn't come back.
A knowledgeable owner, a spinning drive that won't initialise, health data unreadable, and partition tools that normally work seeing nothing at all.
The old Seagate external's light still comes on, but the clicking has started and no computer recognises it.
His elimination was already complete — controller recognised, mount failing cross-platform, cables swapped.
A damaged screen had already demoted the laptop to a TV-connected media machine; then the boot error arrived and even the BIOS stopped answering.
The 4TB drive is split into three volumes, and the whole household has slowed.
The drive mounts, shows its file system, and opens anything asked of it at a glacial crawl.
The update got the first blame — until the laptop test cleared it: the LaCie doesn't appear in either Finder, its light flashes then goes solid.
She was doing the right thing — migrating a lifetime of photos and old documents off an aging mains-powered drive onto a new terabyte.
Textbook isolation: the frozen laptop's SSD produced the same failure in an identical machine.
He renamed a folder, the stick demanded a format, and now it won't register at all.
The diagnostics showed multiple read errors and a couple of hundred important files refused to open with CRC failures.
The drive worked until a blue screen; after the restart it wouldn't boot, wouldn't initialise.
Her enquiry established the innocence of everyone in the room before asking its question. The USB stick "usually just stays in the computer and hasn't been.
Device Manager sees a USB device; nothing anywhere sees a disk; even uninstalling the device hangs halfway.
His research was diligent and his conclusion was the web's consensus: hardware failure, bin it.
Her partner's laptop turns on to nothing: no boot device, and a hardware diagnostic that can't even locate a drive to test.
His sequence is a chain, and he'd traced it honestly. Opening his laptop to upgrade the SSD and RAM, he "slightly damaged the USB-C port without knowing".
The drive: a Seagate Expansion SSD 1TB, no longer read by the computer — "the LED lights up and I can feel movement in the drive.
The drive was fine until one ordinary undocking: laptop off the monitor cable.
The Kingston boot SSD crashed with a workspace of development files and possibly family photos aboard — he isn't sure, and says so.
Both SSDs survived the laptop's thermal death with data intact — but every transfer attempt cooks them in their adapters until speeds collapse and the drives.
The apology was unnecessary: connection sound present, drive absent from My Computer, yet listed by name in the safely-remove menu.
The laptop died, the SSD came out, and two caddies later one recognises something without opening anything.
The USB stick's plastic shell came apart, and inside, the NAND chip had separated from its circuit board.
The previous laboratory did real work — exposed the monolith's pin map, tried their reader, tried their spring-probe adapter.
The hybrid drive from his PS4 wouldn't spin; a smaller drive's board made it spin but not work, and a mail-ordered board with the same model number.
Two weeks old, one holiday of footage, one unscheduled water landing. The card dried out and stopped being recognised.
He hadn't pressed anything: the format was already running, so he cut the power, and when the camera came back every photo was gone.
He sent the lot with admirable clarity — including permission to destroy the adapter holding the snapped card together.
No new apps, no water, no drop — a year of phone photos simply vanished between breakfast and teatime.
The enquiry was a model of preparation: one bare SATA drive from a Dahua digital video recorder, the proprietary recording format named.
She did nearly everything right: refused the format, salvaged what she could, and narrowed the job to a single day's files.
Phone and laptop both blind, Device Manager and CHKDSK exhausted — a completely dead card.
Back from holiday, backed up through image 795, and the card carrying the rest would show its photos only to the camera that took them.
The card lists every MP4, the thumbnails render, and playback dies the same way each time.
Copying pictures from the phone to a new SD card, they disappeared mid-move — corrupted in the gallery, with a LOST.DIR full of nameless files left behind.
A working vehicle, a MicroSD recording in a loop all day every day, and footage the firm needed — with partial access: some clips fine, others broken.
His son feared a terabyte of progress was gone, and the Mac couldn't even read the drive to check — which is normal, not sinister.
The action camera's card filled mid-trip and was formatted by mistake; self-recovery attempts surfaced files.
A follow-up enquiry chasing a timeline — answered properly — and a microSD card that announced its own terminal decline and locked itself read-only.
Tweezers got the card out of the crashed drone looking unbroken — but no reader reacts to it, and the drone itself listed only old photos.
He came home, loaded the card, and found only the final day's photographs; the six days before had simply disappeared.
Her phone was one gigabyte from full; the fix — a new SD card, formatted the way the phone suggested.
The SD card had vanished from two phones and a computer; the app she tried surfaced almost nothing, counted the bad blocks.
The M1 Max machine wouldn't start; Apple's path was a firmware revive, and if that failed, a full restore — total data loss.
The backup to the NAS got stuck; after a replug the drive mounted, then locked Finder solid on browsing.
The enquiry described a relay race stalled at the final baton pass. Her partner's ten-year-old iMac had died.
The maker's own utility could see the drive but none of its buttons did anything; the checklist on the support site changed nothing.
His theory arrived pre-formed and, for once in this archive, substantially correct. The WD My Passport for Mac 2TB "has corrupted," he believed.
His enclosure swap was the rare DIY that both worked and diagnosed: the freezing vanished with the old bridge, proving where fault number one lived.
He was moving project files between two drives when one stopped answering.
The Mac's most famous distress icon, a five-year-old aftermarket SSD fitted before he ever owned the machine.
An old iMac clicking behind a flashing question-mark folder, and a Time Machine backup on the NAS that worked perfectly from the new Mac.
A burning smell while charging on a train, a MacBook Pro that never charged again, a motherboard replacement that didn't fix it.
A performance clean-up on a full MacBook ended with the entire data estate deleted — applications included.
The MacBook crashed mid-edit with the drive attached; repair worked once, failed thereafter, a manual terminal mount reported success and opened onto nothing.
The two-drive unit had been switching itself off and on; Windows proposed a repair, and accepting it calmed the restarts.
This enquiry arrived ninety per cent diagnosed, and its last word was literally "So" — the customer reaching the exact edge of what home tools can establish.
The enquiry came from where these usually should: the organisation's IT support technician, briefing cleanly.
One drive of the pair failed; he bought an identical replacement expecting an automatic re-mirror; the NAS refused.
The RAID was built to survive one failure; it lost two in a night, one not even spinning.
The local shop's diagnosis was sound — Optane SSD corruption, filesystem unhealthy — and his desperation was total: the whole business lives on the machine.
The unit boots happily empty and locks solid the instant its eight mixed-capacity drives are reseated.
The unit: a Netgear ReadyNAS four-bay running two 2TB Seagate Barracuda drives. The presentation: it "connects but only displays the folder names".
A dual-boot machine fell to the emergency boot screen; his response was a competent self-rescue — live system, SSD data copied out.
The email archive was his life's correspondence, built folder by folder over a decade.
An evening's experiment with disk encryption ended in an Automatic Repair loop.
His machine was never encrypted, but it had lived on an infected network, and the drive attached to it now carried a question mark: infected?
The installer tool wiped the external drive as its first step, and a parade of free and paid software scanned the aftermath and reported nothing at all.
The rollback crashed on the ten-year-old machine, File History turned out to have never been on.
A tidy Windows-to-Mac migration — everything off, drive reformatted, everything back.
His NAS was hit through a known remote-access vulnerability, and his handling was exemplary: service disabled, malware removed, passwords changed.
A teacher's backup drive, a stalled music transfer, and an honest confession about the unplug that probably interrupted it.
The media-creation step needed a drive; he pointed it at the external holding ten years of photos, uni work and video.
The drone's card was formatted by mistake and — before the mistake was discovered — used again for a day's shooting. Software finds only the new photos.
His accident came from a missing dialog box. "I accidentally overwrote a 2TB external SSD, as a tool I was using didn't warn me that it was overwriting.
The intrusion came through a convenience left open; the ransom note came with it; and the owner's position was immovable: not a penny.
One barrel plug looks much like another, and the adapter he grabbed wasn't the dock's: the drive hasn't powered up since.
He'd already done the skilled parts — extracted the drive, spotted water damage on the board near the motor connector.
He disconnected it within seconds of the smell — exactly right — and has been manually rebuilding his accounts ever since, against a submission deadline.
He watched smoke rise from his computer, pulled the drive, and ran the decisive test himself.
The spill left the MacBook flashing alternating symbols, refusing to power off properly, occasionally offering an Apple logo before relapsing.
The drive stopped registering; the shop put a meter on the supply and found nearly double the rated voltage.
This archive's DIY chapter has documented board swaps, chip transfers, and heads nudged back into their parks.
He wrote in mid-scan, which made this an intervention: the overnight copy toward a full drive had ended in errors and disconnection.
A repair facility for AV products, a clicking drive from an old iMac, and skilled hands that went one step into the wrong domain before stopping.
The Passport chimes on connection but serves nothing; a previous repairer swapped its burned PCB and then said honestly that the remaining mechanical problem.
The surge killed the enclosure and the hub; the drive itself checked clean and copied beautifully — until it didn't.
The first lab had opened the drive, diagnosed honestly, and failed honestly.
His 2TB external lived between a Pi running Ubuntu and a Windows laptop — and the Pi's logs had been reporting I/O errors while Windows said nothing.
The timeline in this enquiry is the one this archive most wants on record, because its first act happens on thousands of desks right now.
The lab computer died after a power cycle; the in-house IT person could see the drive only intermittently — on and off, impossible to copy from.
A neighbouring case in this batch reads a USB listing where the bridge answers and the drive behind it draws nothing.
The office tower stayed; the drive travelled. When it wouldn't open at home — or back in the tower.
The buzzing Seagate held his brother's only copies — the family's photographs and the backing tracks a singer performs with.
The 2TB secondary drive vanished from the boot menu and re-introduced itself to Windows as something it isn't — while whirring, clicking, and giving up.
Measured in bytes, this is the smallest recovery target in the archive. Measured any other way, it isn't.
She'd already removed it from its case and tested it over a bare SATA connection — capable, careful, and understandably urgent.
The accident in this enquiry had two layers, and the second is the one that decides everything.
The extraction was capable, the plan was sensible, and the blade still wouldn't talk.
He'd been building the family tree, scanning old photos into his genealogy database, when the drive failed.
He arrived on someone else's behalf with everything a lab needs: the model, the capacity, the contents estimate, the fault sequence, and his own honest limit.
Gradual slowdown to the point of unusability, spin-up with repeated head clicking, recognised but unbrowsable.
A PhD student's portable drive, an accident that wasn't his, and the timing that made it bite.
The footage definitely existed — he'd watched it back — and the drive was removed by the book.
His timeline is the one this page exists to reframe. Saturday evening, on a shoot: "the camera fell on the floor with the hard drive attached".
Professional records on physically damaged media: one card chipped at the edge with a gold contact exposed.
A professional wedding photographer's nearly-new G-RAID Mirror stopped mounting and now can't stay powered.
He meant /tmp and hit home, killed the machine almost instantly, then investigated read-only from a live stick.
A school event organiser updating one Excel file when the save failed and the stick vanished from the file manager.
His 4TB external clicked and vanished from every computer — and alongside the quote request came the question every first-timer has.
After her MacBook broke she ran its drive through a caddy — until an OS upgrade seemed to kill it. Ports, computers, powered caddy: all tried.
A storm took the iMac's Fusion Drive; the cloud copy that should have held the newest work had silently never synced; repairs may have made things worse.
The unit: a Netgear Stora, two WD 2TB drives, "probably a little past the use-by date!" — configured, "slightly ignorant of me 10 years ago," as RAID 0.
The NAS died after a firmware update; the maker's helpdesk said a local tech team should open and fix it.
The enquiry opened with a self-assessment this archive will let stand: "I'm possibly the worst type of customer.
His clicking film drive was taking the mouse and keyboard down with it — a genuine USB hostage situation, decoded below.
Her sealed 10-terabyte drive came back from another firm with a changed story and missing parts.
The letter said standard techniques had failed, mentioned a faulty fan, promised a senior engineer and a course of action.
The enquiry described a search this laboratory could run and an expectation it had to correct first.
His elimination was already complete — cables, ports, two machines — and the drive's spinning-clicking surrender left one real question.
The referral chain was actually correct at every step, and her observations were excellent.
The prior diagnosis was fair — trouble with the heads and a motor that won't run.
The three hundredth case file opens with the archive's oldest sentence.
They were honest twice over: they couldn't fix mechanical issues, and they shared their tool's test log so the next lab could see.
His laptop "came up 'no bootable device'"; the sensible basics (power off, unplug, hold the power button, retry) changed nothing.
Her drive fell 30cm off the sofa while connected, yanking the cable out, and now whirs without being recognised — and she lives a long way from any lab.
His enquiry was technically fluent and economically honest, and the second quality shapes the whole case.
A 5TB drive that lights up but shows nothing, four years of photographs aboard, two practical questions.
A laptop that died overnight, a diagnosis of thirty thousand damaged sectors, and all of a person's business and personal data at stake.
A friend's family photos, a friend who didn't want to pay, and a helper capable enough to attempt what almost nobody should.
A crushed laptop, a drive invisible to its own BIOS but half-present over USB, videos and photos of a baby daughter.
Her enquiry arrived with a handling request attached: clean-room-class inspection needed, no software, no diagnostic power.
It worked when she plugged it in at home, then stopped in the same session and wouldn't open again — now making a noise it never made before.
A 3TB Barracuda making horrible clicking and scratching sounds, a correct self-diagnosis of a mechanical fault.
The plug-in point no longer makes proper contact, the model name has worn off the casing, the drive is nearly full.
The LaCie Rugged was bought in March and beeping by May; the owner — a self-funded student living on her loan.
A content creator's 5TB drive — believed an SSD, actually a spinning drive, and the difference matters.
The 8TB drive demanded a disk repair out of the blue, was still visible and accessible.
A parcel mix-up delivered his drive to the right destination by the wrong route.
His confession and his reasoning arrived in the same breath, and both deserve their grades.
The four-hundredth case arrives from a fieldwork team whose drive clunked, clicked, ejected itself and vanished.
Post or drop in your device for a free diagnostic, with a note on what happened — an engineer reviews it and confirms your exact quote in writing before any work begins.
First step: get the device onto our Belfast bench. Wrap it well, tuck your contact details in the box, and post it over — the diagnostic costs nothing, and you’ll have a firm written price to approve before we touch a single sector.
Posting it? A tracked, insured service is best. Dropping it off instead? You’re welcome Monday–Friday, 9am–5:30pm — please still pack the device as above.
Not ready to send anything yet? Use the form to describe the fault in your own words and one of the engineers will come back with a quote tailored to your situation.
We will get back to you soon. If it is urgent, call 028 9002 0144.