I would like recover data from two external – portable hard drives. I’ve opened them both but have damaged read/write heads and they not working – motors working but not showing anything on the PC. Could you let me know how much i have to pay – don’t need to fix drives – only recover data – one of them is 1TB and second 500gb. Im from Leeds.

My hard drive start make strange noise click of death i think this disk need to replace head. I try on my own to replace this with the same model etc but i failed plattern are in good condition can you swap head for me? I can recovery later with programs.

The external hard drive fell out on my bag onto the pavement. The case is still intact and there is nothing rattling around inside. However, the computer won’t identify when connected and it clicks.
Can you please provide a quote for recovering the data by next week?

The hard disk was not detected in the pc . It starts, then clicks and then stops. Please can you help. The 500GB HDD in my MacBook Pro (2009) has failed. I need to copy all data that can be retrieved. Could you pls send me a quote.

We bought a new 2TB WD external drive at the beginning of august and formatted it for Mac. All of a sudden it stopped working. It spins when plugged in then stops, a click can be heard for a few times. After a few minutes the light starts flashing very slowly. According to WD it might be a power issue and the drive could be “sleeping”. When plugged to a PC, the system prompts the drive installation and the “safe removal” icon is available, but, being formatted for Mac, we can’t obviously access it.

I have a Seagate 1TB external hard drive that has been used exclusively with Apple Macs. It has recently stopped working. It was checked by an ICT technician friend who connected it to an external drive dock to see if the drive would be registered – no success. I also took it to the Apple Store to see if they could do anything – again, no success. They suspect that the drive architecture is still ok but the drive electronics may be at fault – when the drive is connected, the led indicator light flashes but there is no drive sound. Could you provide me with a quote to check/repair the drive & hopefully rescue the data?

I’ve recently started providing assistance to people looking for a data recovery service from their mobile phones. I’m currently developing a phone recovery capability that will allow me to retrieve the data from all types of mobile (smart) phone. Here a some of the enquiries I’ve had recently:

Phone Has Gone Through The Wash
My personal phone went in the washing machine. It is currently in a box of rice in an attempt to dry it out. I need to recover photos taken for business purposes. My business phone number is attached.

Erased iPhone Data
I accidentally erased my iPhone and although I have a backup up to 2 days before the erase, I lost everything from the most recent 2 days. The most important lost data is voice memos which I have tried hard to recover using online tools, but failed. I have nearly lost hope, but is there ANY way of recovering voice memos on the iPhone that were recorded 5-6 hours before the iPhone was erased please? I would be very grateful for any help.

Dropped iPhone in Water
Dropped my iphone 6 into water, screen was already cracked and now is cracked more, after retrieving my phone from the water the screen was not working properly, I turned it off immediately and now I can’t get it to turn back on, there are some photos on there I really want to recover so if you could let me know how much that would cost that would be great.

Motorola Moto G Died
Sons phone – Motorola Moto G (orig model I think abt 2 1/2 yrs old) no memory card has been dropped on hard surface and died – would really like to recover data – photos / videos – not backed up. can you help. Could get to London office or possibly watford

Sony Xperia Recovery Needed
Sony Xperia need to recover sms, video and whatsapp messages

Smashed Samsung Galaxy
My partner has had her Samsung Galaxy S6 hit out of her hand, it has not booted since smashing on the floor and does not connect via USB to other computers. This phone holds nearly all the pictures and videos of our children. Is it possible to recover these files from the internal memory?
It was hard impact on to the floor, causing screen to crack and possibly some other damage.
The phone appears to partially boot and freezes, so I’m hoping the flash memory may be ok internally.
If so, what would the likely cost and timescale be for this?
I really appreciate any help you can provide.

A question from a visitor to the web site >>
“My problem is: I took out the original HDD from samsung SVR-950E and used clonezila to external disk but when I put back the original HDD inside the SVR cannot detect the drive.
I know the files are inside! It’s not formated or something was written to it!!!! I think the partition headers are lost or the headers of the files. I immediately turned off the SVR and the original drive is not powered! So is there any possible way to recover the files, the videos from the original drive, i am in greater manchester and this is urgent!!”

Looking at the Clonezilla web site, it’s very unlikely that this software would be the cause of your problem. The software is open source and free to use. If is were not good at it’s job it would soon disappear under a pile bad reviews. However, perhaps you have a hacked version of Clonezilla? Did you download it from a reputable source? (For other’s reading this, it’s important that you download open source software from reputable sources, as hackers will target open source software and add malicious code to it and then upload it to no-so-reputable servers to be downloaded and spread).

I have a fair amount of experience with Samsung SVR / DVR’s in general and it could be that the problem was caused when you removed the SVR-950E from the CCTV system. Incorrect removal or insertion of hard drives into these systems can cause a flag to be set that fools the Samsung recorder into thinking that a new drive has been inserted into the system. This causes the hard drive to be initialised as a new disk and is achieved by writing a data block to the hard drive.

Of course, this might not the problem. You write to that “the SVR cannot detect the drive”. It could be therefore, that some sort of electrical or mechanical fault has happened to the drive.

You don’t write that the drive is ticking or making a beeping noises though which is a good indication that the hard drive does NOT have a serious problem. It probably is possible to get the data from the drive therefore. The first stage is to correctly identify the problem and then take action to solve and fix the problem. Once completed successfully the data should be recoverable quite easily. There are not many high quality data recovery companies in the UK, particularly ones that are familiar with CCTV and Samsung equipment, most are mentioned on the http://24hourcomputerrepairs.com/ microblog, a niche site that concentrates many of it’s articles on hard drive recovery (including CCTV). The blog is also UK focused which is good as I notice you are located in Greater Manchester.

My main hard drive, that I use as a backup drive is giving me problems, very slow to access and incomplete data. Attempted install of Mac OS El Capitan on our iMac which seems to have initiated a repair error on the Macintosh HD. Unfortunately we have not backed up for a while there so there is data that we could lose. We have a new external HD and have tried an image with no luck. We need an expert!! It is not a great deal of data and I can see the structure in the disk utility but just can’t get to the data.

I can fix most hard drive problems myself but they all rely on one particular thing: the hard drive continues to spin. When the hard drive spins it means it can communicate with the computer and there software programs can still interact with the hard drive and talk to it. When the hard drive is not spinning the computer can no longer recognise it and this is where my skill ends. But all is not lost, I can no longer help you but I know a service that can – Datlabs Data Recovery in the UK (http://www.datlabsdatarecovery.co.uk) provide the services of data recovery from hard drives that aren’t speaking to their computers any longer. Try them for data recovery, they will be able to help.

WDC HDD Recovery

I dropped my WDC 1T external hard drive and now my computer no longer recognizes it. The drive still powers on and I can hear/feel it whirring. I am based in London and need to recover the data ASAP. Hard Drive is making a clicking sound is not detected in bios.

As you are in London my advice is to go straight to this post on Data Replay Services – http://datareplayservices.com/local-data-recovery-services/ which recommends local data recovery services throughout the UK. Data Replay Services is a niche blog site that concentrates on hard disk troublehshooting, computer forensics and the like.

External Hard Drive Recovery

My external hard drive has stopped working it make noise when it is connected but my computer does not detect it. It is only detected in device manager but can’t see any data or save any data on it. Please help me recover the data.

I can help retrieve the files from this one because the external hard drive is still spinning (see above). My advice for the time being is to disconnect the drive and power it down. It’s not common knowledge but nothing bad can happen to a hard drive when it’s switched off (unless it’s dropped of course). No data is written and the mechanical and electronic circuits are not powered on so no harm can come to them also.

“WD my passport has a clicking noise and it is not loading, it has someone elses data and and i am wondering how much it would cost to get it working again.”

A clicking noise and a WD My Passport hard drive that isn’t loading is is situation that calls for a data recovery service. You can always to to learn how to recover data from a bad external hard drive but I advise against it. Data recovery is difficult at the best of times and putting hard drive into the hands of someone who doesn’t know what they are doing is a recipe for disaster. To avoid this costly mistake (you may actually loose your data), it’s a good idea to learn about hard drives and how they work. The WD My Passport hard drive is not different from all the only conventional hard drives you see for sale. To learn about hard drives, their problems and what to do about them when they go wrong I Googled some typical hard drive failures like “busted hard drive” and “how to fix a WD passport”. Once I’d gotten past a lot of crap I found some useful links to some useful sites. A couple of favourites were http://www.recover-deleted-data.co.uk – a good site for learning about the practice of data recovery [including WD My Passports], and http://johnnyforeigner.jimdo.com which is another data recovery blog but rather more technical in nature than the first site.

Phone forensic and investigation tools provide powerful decoding and analysis facilities for the extracted device data, and simplify the task of navigating through the device ís data structures. These data extraction tools assist in the complex tasks of intelligence gathering, investigative research, and providing legal evidence in the form of reports.

Most phone recovery applications are designed to utilize the memory extracted and present the device ís hex extraction, file system and analyzed data in a clear and concise way, allowing investigators to use powerful search tools to reveal relevant information. As a completing step, most phone recovery service applications enable you to generate reports of your findings in various file formats, such as HTML, PDF, Excel (*.xlsx), and XML.

JTAG Data Extraction

JTAG (Joint Test Action Group) is an advanced method of data extraction that requires a forensic examiner to connect to the test access ports of the device to obtain a full physical image. This enables the examiner to unlock and gain accessto the raw data stored on the memory chip.† JTAG is non-destructive and offers the opportunity to access data from devices that have been altered or damaged in some way, where data ports are unavailable (or disconnected), or it is otherwise impossible to unlock the device using other forensic tools. Phone recovery companies are usually able to automate the JTAG extraction process once the physical connection to the device has been made.
Once you have the physical memory that was acquired with this method, it can be loaded into a software application for decoding. This will compile and prepare all the data, as if it was a regular extraction done without the intervention of phone recovery software.

Phone recovery experts like http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery-from-mobile-devices-phones-tablets-etc/ are able to go further than just JTAG extraction and provide the appropriate meta-data associated with the data that can be so crucial in many cases. This data (along with it’s associated meta-data) displays groups of analyzed data that are related to device specific features such as contacts, SMS messages, call logs, and so on. The available information and what is displayed depends on the device features and application version. For example, SMS messages are sorted according to the folders used by the messaging feature of the device, such as Drafts, Inbox, Outbox, Sent, and so on. Email messages are sorted according to the account through which they were sent or received. An uncategorized account or messages folder lists the folders or messages that
cannot be categorized in any of the found accounts or account folders (Inbox, Outbox, Drafts, and so on).