Hard drive data recovery

How we recover a failed hard drive

Most hard drive failures are one of four things: failed read/write heads (clicking, ticking), a stuck motor or heads stuck to the platter (buzzing, beeping), electronics (no spin, a burnt smell after a power surge) or firmware (detected with the wrong name or size, or 0 GB).

Firmware and electronics are repaired on the bench. Head and motor failures are repaired in the cleanroom, with donor parts matched by model, firmware and production details. The drive is then imaged with hardware that reads healthy areas first and comes back to weak ones, so the most data is captured before anything else can fail.