Data recovery service in Manchester

What advice do you tell someone whose hard drive is not working or is no longer recognised? My advice would be to get them to contact a data recovery company. Which data recovery company? Well my advice would be to read this blog as I do make several suggestions. Below are some questions I’ve received about data recovery.

I have an OCZ Vertex 2 that’s been working fine for 6 years (Win 10 connected to desktop with Gigabyte mobo). Having properly powered down my PC yesterday, upon booting this morning the SSD is not identified during BIOS loading.
I tried resetting CMOS; cycling the drive with power cable only; etc. but to no avail. Green led on the drive is lit solid (not red). I saw your note re Vertex 2 – has any solution been identified since then? Is it possible to move the memory chips onto another circuit board? I’d hate to lose years of precious data.

I have a Seagate ST1500DM003 external HDD, and doesn’t work. Maybe it burned the engine. I have a many more photos on this HDD. Can you help me recover the data?

Drive was working fine yesterday. no bumps or knocks to it. no damage. drive cannot now be seen by laptop os. sometimes seems to be working properly then not. no os on this drive as being used as a slave unit..
Can you provide an approx cost – only some dats is important – music files and various other >doc/Excel documents

WD HDD drive fails to boot. Had it removed and replaced, need the data from it. Is no longer starting up. I need to recover my files and save them elsewhere.

I was hoping I could have a WD Elements external hard drive (WDBU6Y0020BBK-01) assessed to see if any data could be recovered from it. It stopped working a couple of years ago and it has taken me a while to get round to sorting it out.
If I recall correctly the drive would not power up when plugged in but it did not appear on my computer. It may possibly have been an issue with the port on the drive being slightly loose. As it is usb powered it would often disconnect and reconnect it quick succession as a result. I am obviously no expert but I have been told it could potentially be a corruption issue caused over time by the cable being physically loose.
Would it be possible to have this looked at and what would be cost of assessment and the likely cost of repair (if it is repairable)?

WD Hard drive makes a clicking noise and not recognised by Windows. Have had this problem for the last couple of years. Was on the verge of giving up but today, file explorer opened for 5 seconds showing the contents of the drive. Are you able to help recover the data?

Here’s a selection of some of the latest problems we’ve been asked to look at. As hard drive recovery specialists we can often recover the data from systems when you’ve given up hope. Our friends at Data Recovery Tips have some great online advice about hard drive recovery that we can recommend should be get into problems with a computer disk!

We have a RAID array with 8 hard drives, three drives have failed, what are the chances of any data recovery and could you give a rough estimate of cost? Thanks

My son has a seagate expansion portable drive on which he has a number of downloaded x box games on for his x box one console, when it was turned on last night the x box would start up and then turn off, we noticed that it would repeatedly go off and on when the hard drive was plugged into the console and that the console would work fine by itself if the drive wasn’t attached. Can you help as obviously this has caused the end of the world with the potential loss of progress on his games!

My dad accidentally deleted my pictures off my external hard drive a while back but i havent used it since, would I be able to get them back? Also how much does it cost

iMac hard drive was clicking on start up and couldn’t be found and apple support said it has to be replaced. I need my data recovered first – especially photos – which I don’t have backed up. Its an iMac 27inch from 2011. 1TB hard drive.

Hi – I have an LTO backup disk with an SQL server database on it. We don’t have facilities to read it here, so I need to get it restored onto a server to enable access to it and put it onto another medium. Is that a service you would offer?

The USB port on the external hard drive has come away from the circuit board. Can you glue/solider back on?
Seagate 1TB portable hard drive.
The hard drive or its files will not show up on any laptop or computer.
The light is flashing and the hard drive whirs but that is it. It is said to be ‘unavailable’ when located in the devices folder.

Hello, my portable hard drive Free Agent GoFlex is broken, computers does not see it. How much will be the recovery of data?

Mechanical Fault on HDD.

I have a western digital 2TB hard drive with five years worth of footage that i desperately need back as some of the videos were going to be used for my dissertation, it started off just not connecting through the cable, so i left the hard drive back home with my friend to use an adapter to get the footage back and copy it over. However, when he went to copy the data to a new drive, it has started making a ticking noise and not showing up on any machine that he has tried. Is there anything you could do to help with this issue and would you be able to provide a quote/estimate of how much it’d be?

It is a 2TB Seagate Barracuda, roughly 4 years old. It stopped working completely and is not being seen in Disk Management. When it boots there is a squeaky sound.

My Sony Vaio laptop turns on saying the hard disk/drive was not detected. I do not know why as last time I used it worked perfectly fine. Please get in touch asap via email. I am free on Monday 31st so I can drop it then.

I have an iPhone that is stuck on the Apple logo and won’t reboot or enter recovery mode so as to allow recovery of files. It is an iPhone 4S. I live in Switzerland. Do you offer a service whereby I could send the unit to you (Fedex) for you to do a diagnostic test? If so, could you send me a list of prices, or at least the price for a diagnostic test.
In this case, I’d be seeking to recover the photo files and the voice memorandum file in the iPhone dictaphone utility.

A seagate external hard drive is not responding when connected. Need to recover the data in the hard drive. Could you please give me a quote for this service. I am based in London.

About 27gb of photos and videos lost, from Europe trip between April and June 2016, stored on microsd card within Motorola G3 phone. Event occurrence in end June: Dropped the Android phone from bedside table height while connected for charging, and connected to wifi, onto soft carpeted floor. Microsd card malfunction possibly due to potential unseen/unaccepted Android system update, possibly initiated by being connected to wifi after a long time, or by the drop with charge (causing a potential short circuit).

I have a Toshiba External hard drive which doesn’t seem to be working, it turns on but doesn’t boot properly or appear on my computer. I’ve tried different power cables and USB cables but they don’t work. It usually makes a fast clicking noise and the light on the front turns blue but it’s staying red and not making the noise any more. Any ideas what’s happened? I haven’t dropped it or.moved it at all it just suddenly started doing his.

Samsung HD103SJ rev.02.roo
Clicking noise, spins up then shuts down. not detected in system bios.

In this post I reproduce two questions I received from customers about their problematic hard drives. If you have a problem with a hard drive and would like me to advise of what can be done retrieve that data then contact me and I’ll see what I can do for you.

Buffalo Hard Drive Retrieval

I am unable to open my buffalo hardrive and wondered how much retrieval might cost?

As Buffalo make many different types of hard drive the answer to your question depends upon what model of hard drive you actually have. Single hard drives are cheaper to recover the data from than units that contain more that one hard drive. Normally Buffalo external hard drives that feature more than one disk are raid systems – and these can be very expensive. I dug out the following details of a decent data recovery company from England that gets good reviews: http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery-buffalo-nas-terastation-linkstation/. I suggest you reach out to them if you are serious about getting the information back from your problematic hard drive. They should be able to give you a range of costs for their services.

Hard Drive Recovery in London

I have a 500gb Western digital WD blue ssd hd that makes a clicking sound. there is data on there (not to bothered about it) but wanted the actual hd repaired. how much would it cost im in feltham west london so would like the address of the chiswick branch so i can drop and collect.

The address of the hard drive recovery lab is Chiswick is 556 Chiswick High Road, London W4 5YA, their webpage is http://www.datlabsdatarecovery.co.uk/data-recovery-chiswick-2/.

As a general rule, repairing a hard drive is not cost effective. A new hard drive with a dedent storage capacity can be bought for around £50, and hard drive repair work is done by data recovery companies and this costs hundreds of pounds. Therefore, if you are not bothered about getting your data back, buy yourself a new hard drive instead of using a data recovery company.

I’ve been supporting RAID and servers for longer than I care to remember… I think the earliest server (excluding ICL mainframes) that I worked on was an ICL Intel 486 system, back in something like 1992.

This was before Windows and as we know, things have moved on significantly since then. Servers were complicated beasts back then, now they’re even more complex. One thing that really annoys me is 1st/2nd line technical support staff who rather than admit they don’t know what they’re talking about will recommend the wrong course of action because they don’t know any different.

Here’s my response to an email from a customer of ours with a 7 disk RAID 5 server that has significant bad sector problems across several of the disk in the volume. The customer has been told by his tech support to rebuild the array and everything will work fine… WRONG, the rebuild will fail because of the bad sectors across multiple drives. This will cause a huge amount of irreversible data loss for the customer who is a professional video editor.

Hi <X>,

My colleague <Y> has just informed me you’ve been in touch after speaking to tech support regarding your RAID.

The rebuild procedure they suggest will unfortunately not complete successfully due to several of your hard drives having bad sectors issues. Rebuilding is an automated software task that relies on all the drives involved being free from bad sectors. Rebuilding is unable to cope with bad sectors – which are a physical problem. This is why drives with bad sectors have to be recovered using hardware rather than software. I wrote a blog post about this sometime ago, titled something like ‘5 things you mustn’t do if your RAID fails’. – take a look at all of it – especially the last point: http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/raid-or-server-failure-the-top-5-things-to-avoid/

As you know, we’ve been doing this long enough to know what we’re talking about, so may I suggest two possible courses of action –

1. We complete the recovery as planned.

Or

2. We first clone all your hard drives (effectively copying them) before returning them to you so you can then try the rebuild. Us having cloned your hard drives means we can go back to the data and perform the recovery when the rebuild doesn’t work.

Rebuilds that are unsuccessful result in massive data loss across the entire RAID and are irreversible due to the old (good) data being overwritten by the new (corrupt) data. It’s one of the largest causes of data loss on any type of RAID 5 system, and we wish tech support companies would stop recommending it as they are assuming all the hard drives in the array are free from bad sectors (which is the reason your RAID fell over in the first place).

Please let us know how you’d like to proceed.

I’ve just emailed this to the customer and await their response.

Data Clinic Ltd, the well know UK hard drive repair and data recovery specialist has announced a new data recovery service for Microsoft Exchange Server.

Exchange keeps all its data in a large EDB file which can become easily corrupted by a server crash, RAID error, or software corruption. Remember as well that the most common cause of data loss – human error, can also result in EDB files being deleted.

Inside the EDB file are often many individual PST files – one for each user, the Data Clinic service is able to extract these from the EDB file and repair individual PST files where necessary.

I don’t know about you, but these days the family environment is a busy one when it comes to IT and computers. My eldest daughter has her own laptop and my youngest daughter has an IPad. They both have smartphones too. As well and texting and all the other things teenagers use their mobile phones for, they also take a lot of photographs that want to save.

Saving this data on the family iMac was fine – there was plenty os space and it was an easy thing to achieve but as time went by there was more and more data to store – more photos, more videos and now music too. Using the internet to search for an answer to my problem, my attention was drawn to Network Attached Storage, otherwise known as NAS. Basically these are devices that connect to the router in your house an allow anyone connected to that router to use them. Great I thought – I’ll get one of those !

So I did, everyone was happy. It came in a nice box with a link to Datlabs NAS Data Recovery Services, who I could call if I needed any technical assistance setting the NAS up and getting it working correctly. I just plugged it in, typed our password and it installed itself on our network. The first thing to do was to transfer all our photos, videos and music data from our family Mac onto the NAS. That was easy – a simple drag and drop operation saw that completed without any problems. There was a lot of data – some 50GB or so… How do teenagers make so much data?? All of which was of course, essential to them.

Anyway with that done I set about cleaning the Mac up and deleting files and folders. Another 30 minutes or so and this was completed. The first thug I noticed was the the machine began to run a lot quicker – which was a result I was very pleased with.

Next I took a look at the configuration of our new NAS device. It’s a 4 disk Linux based storage device that runs RAID 5. This means that the data it holds is spread across the whole 4 disks instead of one. That’s a bit odd I thought but after closer investigation I learned that this was infact a good thing. It allows one drive to fail and my data to still survive without being lost. RAID 5 also provide enhanced data read speeds too – something that was evident from the moment we began using our NAS file server concurrently. My daughters could watch their movies while I was able to stream music from it. This all worked fine – something that we could never do before on the Mac as it was just not quick enough.

So introducing a NAS RAID file server into our home environment has been a great success. Installing it was easy and I didn’t need to contact Datlabs for help in setting it up, I do think I’ll keep their link though just incase anything happens to the NAS that I can’t sort out myself.

As a contractor in the computer support industry I come into a lot of contact with servers and RAID arrays. In fact, my main job is looking after the data held on SAN servers and other form of Network Attached Storage. I work for companies and government institutions as a sort of freelance computer troubleshooter and mostly use IBM, Dell and HP server equipment. The Dell servers are typically Dell Poweredge series and the HP kit is mainly Proliant. Again the equipment is hooked up to a SAN data network.

Data redundancy is a big problem of mine, it’s what happens when I inherit old legacy systems that really should have been decommissioned years ago but because of budgetary constraints have continued to be used. I work on several HP Proliant and Dell SAN servers that I’d love to switch off and migrate the data onto something far more up to date like a Dell Blade or IBM X Server system. Unfortunately, I don’t really have any say in buying new equipment.

Older servers and computer equipment fails more regularly, it just does. It wears out, hard drive fail, memory goes bad and UPS’s fail. What greeted me when I came into work last Monday was a failed SAN server array – 12 disks running in a RAID 5 configuration with a hot spare. Analysis of the server logs showed that one of the hard drives had dropped out of the array on Saturday causing the hot spare to click in. This had seemingly worked fine – the hot spare should simply be ‘rebuilt’ back into the array, but instead the whole array had fallen over.

In the server room the SAN’s RAID BIOS reported that three of the hard drives had now dropped out from the array. Well, that would explain why the SAN server was no longer booting the array. What had caused the three drives to fail was at this point a mystery. The server in question was one that ran part of the council payroll so it was obviously important to get the SAN back up and running as soon as possible, but obviously this had to be done in a method that followed best practice. It became my task and no data could be lost in recovering the SAN either.

Now I’m good a IT and SAN server support I’ll admit but when I discover 2 of the 3 drives that had dropped from the array had mechanical faults, the problem was beyond my abilities. I used a data recovery company a few years back but they were no more. Searching online pointed me to a specialist SAN recovery company called RAID and Server Data Recovery, an online review or two told me they could be trusted and that they were recommended, so I called them.

I spoke to RAID and Server Data Recovery’s specialist SAN recovery team who confirmed what I thought already. Some of the drives had mechanical damage and would need clean room attention in order to progress the data recovery attempt. I got clearance for the costs from finance and loaded the SAN server into the car and drove it down to the recovery company.

Analysis showed 1 drive had a head crash while the other two had firmware issues. Firmware is code that runs the hard drive’s operating system. It can corrupt and when it does the hard drive fails. It seemed that this firmware problem was the cause of the SAN crashing and all that needed fixing was the firmware on the two failed drives. This was indeed the case and after the repairs to the hard disks were completed and the drives re-integrated back into the SAN RAID BIOS, the SAN came back online and the data was accessible again. Panic over. The data was fully restored which was the outcome everyone had wanted.

Now those of you lucky (?) enough to know me will know that I spend a good portion of my time working out of an office in Central London. Some of you may even have visited me there and yes I have tidied up since the last time you visited ! I know I hardly ever tidy up but a new girlfriend in my life means I have to do these things in case she wants to drop in and visit me.

Another reason I had to tidy up was to avoid accidents like the one that happened to me last Thursday. There I was, enjoying my Burger King meal whilst surfing the net. The phone rang and I moved to answer it and managed to knock my Coke over. I’d taken the lid off and the result was the liquid missed my computer but spilt all over my external hard drive instead. It was one of those annoying calls trying to sell me something as well, so to say I was annoyed is putting it mildly.

Anyway I got rid of the call and cleaned up the mess. I then noticed that my external hard drive wasn’t working anymore… Hmm worrying.. I switched it on and off again but got no response, the lights weren’t coming on and the disk wasn’t making it’s usual whirring sound either.

I work to deadlines and although I didn’t have a deadline for that day I did for the week after and my external hard drive contained data that I didn’t have anywhere else. A few phone calls to some friends (yes I do have them) had me looking for data recovery companies or services. People who fix hard disks are not called ‘people who fix hard disks’, they are called ‘data recovery companies’ and finding a good one can be a difficult process. I assumed that all data recovery companies are as capable as each other but this isn’t so. One data recovery company can be rubbish, whilst another one can be good. After looking around I choose Data Recovery London and I’m very pleased I did. They were able to rescue the data on my hard drive and also repair it so that it worked  again. This was a great outcome as all it meant I had to do was plug my hard drive back into my computer again and everything worked ! Thanks Data Recovery London, you saved my life, and quite possibly my job too.

Security is an important concern for any business.  Having a strong security system is not only important in terms of deterring and preventing theft, but it can also be an important factor in determining your insurance premiums.  Businesses need to worry about theft by local gang bangers as well as employees with access to inventory and the cash register.  Even a full time security guard does not have eyes in the back of his head.  To get the most comprehensive surveillance possible, you need video monitoring.  CCTV DVR systems represent a great system towards these ends.

Closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras are at the heart of any monitoring system.  These provide the watchful eye that scans your shop, potentially 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.  These can be acquired in simple black and white, color, or even with infrared capability.  The latter is especially useful if they will be monitoring the place in the dark.

Each camera is outfitted with a lens that defines the viewing angle.  These lenses can be configured for a very wide fisheye style viewing angle to cover the most real estate possible.  They can also cover a narrow field if you need a close up view with detail, such as perhaps near a cash register where one might want to be able to catch the denominations of any bills pulled out.  Cameras can also have zoom lenses that can pan in and out when controlled remotely.

It is not uncommon for CCTV cameras in such a system to be hard wired directly to a digital video recorder (DVR) which will record all of the footage in real time.  However, many modern cameras are being produced to work without being physically wired in to any other device other than the electrical socket supplying power.  These usually have their own wireless data transmitter that is connected to a wireless router or hub.  This hub then usually connects to the worldwide web and the DVR. The DVR can be either at the location being monitored or somewhere off site where it is secured from being tampered with by employees or thieves.

There are many advantages to this setup.  First, this makes setting up the system relatively easy.  There is no need to worry about running cable lines from various parts of the establishment, which could require substantial refits to the premises.  Each camera in such a system can also be polled remotely using its assigned IP address in real time.  If the DVR fails for some reason, this could be useful for obtaining real time security.  Certain cameras might even have the ability to pan back and forth and zoom in and out.  These could then be controlled remotely using by the IP address with this setup if suspicious activity is observed.

The DVR’s primary function is to collect and store the incoming data.  In older systems this would have been handled by a video cassette recorder (VCR).  The obvious disadvantages of the latter system are (1) the short duration of the tape which requires frequent replacements, (2) the ability to only record one camera per VCR, and (3) the inability to go back and view previous video frames on the tape while it is still a problem.  DVRs solve all of these problems.

DVRs utilize a hard disk to store the data instead of a tape.  All video is digitized at the level of the CCTV and then compressed into a digital file using standard computer video formats.  Due to the speed of the digital processing power of the DVR, it can handle signals from many cameras at once, writing all the data onto different hard drive files as the data comes in.  Since computer hard drives can hold up to four terabytes of data, a lot of video can be stored before the old video would have to be backed up to some other sort of backup.  Since hard drives operate on the principle of random access, one can always go back and view any frame or multiple clips from multiple views simultaneously even though the system is still recording. As you probably know, hard drives can break from time to time and the data on them lost. Should this happen it’s frequently necessary to contact a CCTV or DVR data recovery specialist.

DVRs can be configured as standalone units, like home entertainment center DVRs, or as personal computers outfitted to perform the same function.  A computer DVR will give a business owner much more flexibility in terms of software that can be used in addition to software and hardware expansion possibilities.  However, a standalone unit can be more stable since it is usually not working on a bloated PC operating system that can be prone to crash.  Multiple PCs can be used, one off site and one on site, if crashes are a concern.  The latter configuration also provides some redundancy in case of an outgoing network failure effecting the off site DVR or physical tampering of the data at the on site unit.

CCTV DVR systems have provided business owners with more options to monitor their operations more efficiently. Deterring crime with 24/7 surveillance has never been more easy to install and cost effective.