The platters were perfect - the fault was in the hidden firmware area the drive reads before it will talk to a PC.
A photographer in Keynsham brought in a Samsung SpinPoint that span up normally but showed in the computer's BIOS as a string of nonsense characters and the wrong capacity. To anyone listening it sounded perfectly healthy, which is what made it so puzzling. When a drive behaves like this the mechanics are usually fine — the fault sits in the service area, the hidden zone on the platters that holds the drive's own firmware. A drive has to load that firmware correctly before it will even identify itself to a computer, and if part of it is corrupt the drive ends up unable to introduce itself properly.
Connected to our equipment the drive responded but reported an invalid identity, the tell-tale sign of a service-area problem rather than a head or platter fault. This is firmware-level territory, completely separate from the data area the user ever sees, and it is not something a normal computer can reach or repair.
The tool for this work is the PC3000. We accessed the drive's service area directly, read out its individual firmware modules and identified the ones that had become corrupted. Drives keep backup copies of their critical modules precisely for this situation, so we rebuilt the damaged modules from the good copies and the drive's own micro-code, then re-initialised it. It immediately reported its correct model and full capacity and became readable again. From there we took a full image of the now-cooperative drive.
With the firmware repaired the drive imaged without a single bad sector. We rebuilt the file system from the image and opened a range of the photographer's image files and catalogues to confirm everything was whole before writing it to fresh media.
Every image file and catalogue came back intact, four working days from start to finish. A service-area fault looks alarming — a healthy-sounding drive the computer flatly refuses to recognise — but the data is almost always sitting there untouched, waiting for the firmware to be put right.
PC3000 — imaging and recovery carried out in-house. Every job is imaged before any recovery work begins, and the original media is never written to.
Send us your device for a free diagnostic, and tell us a little about what happened — an engineer will review it and confirm your exact quote in writing before any work begins.
Recovering your data starts with getting the device to us. Pack it safely, add your contact details, and send it over — after we run a free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work begins.
Posting it in? We recommend a tracked, insured service. Prefer to drop it off? You’re welcome Monday–Friday, 9am–5:30pm — please still package the device as above.
If you need more information on our data recovery service, fill out the form with more detail about your issue and an engineer will review it and give you a custom quote.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 0117 332 1137.
Yes — clicking, dropped, dead and firmware-fault drives are our most common job. We replace failed heads in our clean-air environment and image on a DeepSpar with the PC3000, working only from a copy.
Hard drive recovery is from £300 plus VAT, with no fix, no fee on most jobs. You get a fixed written quote before any work begins.
No. Every power-on of a clicking or failing drive risks more damage. Switch it off and bring it in, or post it to us.
Start with an instant online quote, or call and talk it through with us first. You'll have a clear, fixed price before any work begins.