Devices · hard drives (internal)
A hard drive has four weak points — heads, motor, board and firmware — and every dead disk failed at one of them. What decides the outcome is what happens next. Power it down, post it from Exeter, and leave the rest to the lab.
Talk it over with an engineer
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| What it says | What it usually means | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| You need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it | In Windows, RAW means the file table has broken — the files beneath it are usually whole | Unplug it — and leave Format alone |
| Data error (cyclic redundancy check) | Checksum failure on a read — bad sectors, almost every time | Halt the copy and image it the proper way |
| The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error | Responses from the drive are no longer something Windows can rely on | Power it off and record the model name |
| Windows detected a hard disk problem | Its SMART data predicts the drive's death | Rescue the files today, or image |
| Error 0x800701E3 — a fatal device hardware error | Mid-transfer, the hardware is failing | No more retries — lab work now |
| S.M.A.R.T. Status BAD at power-on | That start-up self-check came back failed | Don't boot from that disk again |
| BIOS reports 0GB, or garbles the model name | Firmware or translator damage: the drive has forgotten what it is | Firmware work, lab only |
Your device is logged under its own case number the day it arrives. An engineer finds the fault, tells you plainly what stands a real chance of coming back, and writes you one fixed quote. Nothing is charged for that look, nothing obliges you, and paid work starts only when you say so.
Your drive is mounted on a hardware imager built to coax data past weak regions instead of hammering them. Only once a clean copy exists does any further work begin.
Failed heads get a matched donor stack, a seized spindle is released, and a burnt PCB is mended with your drive's own ROM carried over to it.
Working on the image, the file system is pieced together again — and you see a full list of what was saved before a penny is owed.
Before any fee falls due you see a full listing of everything recovered and approve it. Your files travel back on brand-new media, return postage on us, and the case stays open until you've confirmed everything opens on your own machine.
How often do drives really die? Backblaze's Drive Stats — the one big dataset anyone publishes — put the annualised failure rate for 2025 at 1.36% across a fleet of 344,000-plus datacentre drives, down from 1.57% the year before. Home and office disks see gentler duty and fail more rarely — but with far less notice.
Two of the heads were gone and the platters had sat still for weeks. Once donor heads went in, the opening image pass hit 96%, and every invoice, account file and photo left us verified.
Not usually. A click means the heads have given up reading, not that the platters hold nothing. With matched donor heads and slow, careful imaging, most such drives give back most of their data. The damage comes from repeated power-ons, not from the noise.
Yes, as a rule — be straight with us about it, that's all. A drive that's been opened outside a lab is quoted only after we've inspected the platters, and earlier damage can take a job out of the no-fix-no-fee scheme.
Diagnosis is free, and a written price arrives before we do any paid work. The lower end of the range is where logical faults sit; mechanical jobs that need donor parts cost more. The figure always reaches you before the work does.
Of course. IDE, early SATA and SAS disks are bread and butter here. What age changes is the tooling, not the outcome.
Each power-up of a failing device takes more data with it. Open a case first — the look-over is free whichever way it goes.