Data recovery service in Manchester

I have a WD Passport for Mac, which i use to store my photos and music on. The Mac broke and i had to run disk utility in order to recover the data. I took the mac to Apple and they installed a new OS, and new Photos programme.
The files on the drive are now just showing greyed out, and the disk says there’s only 53kb of data in the photos folder. When i try to import them to the new photos, it says the file isn’t recognised.

Similarly, my Hitatchi 4TB external windows HDD from 2012. Just stopped working one day, now makes a series of small clicks after being powered up. Displays as unformatted drive in Drive Manager.

I was referred to Data Clinic by my colleague at the firm I am working at in Glasgow. I am getting in touch to inquire about unlocking / recovering a WD Ultra Passport that I locked with a ATA password and cannot remember the password to. The drive is currently in locked state and I have not formatted it. I am willing to provide any information that would hail me as the owner of this drive if required.

When my external hard drive is plugged into a computer, the light goes blue as meant to.
However the drive doesn’t get listed on the file explorer, but it is recognised by the device manger.
It makes a very weird repeated buzzing noise when first plugged in that stops exactly after 10 seconds. The drive doesn’t show up and I need my files recovered.

I have sent in a 500GB SATA internal hard drive to Data Clinic in Glasgow branch that I have requested data recovery, along with a 1GB SSD drive to be used for the data transfer. I would like confirmation that Data Clinic have my drives and that they are in Data Clinic’c Manchester data recovery centre.

My Seagate Backup Plus external drive has failed. It makes a ticking noise when first plugged in and it is not discoverable so I can’t access any of my data.

In this post I decided to send some hard drives to Recover Deleted Data to test their data recovery capabilities. I was surprised what I discovered: they were actually very good. It’s not often that an ‘under the radar’ hard drive recovery company like this are any good. With a bit of digging I found out that they were trained by Data Clinic Ltd, who are recognised experts in data recovery.

My external driver (I think he means ‘hard disk drive’) has some problems and I can not get access to my data.
The lens (I think he means ‘read write heads’) are damaged and are touching the disk not allowing it to spin.
I would like to recover all the data on this external driver.
How much this will cost?
Where do you usually save this data? Do you need a new external driver?

Adjusted my WD MyPassport 1TB from one position to the other (didn’t even drop it) and it stopped working. Making the clicking noise. I need the whole 1TB worth of data recovered (I can send a working hard drive to put it on if need be?) and I am looking for preferably less than £100.

Comment: There is no chance of recovering the data from a mechanically damaged hard drive like yours for anything less than £395 ex VAT

Windows Safe Mode Problems
Installed Windows Media Pack 3 which caused the computer to not boot. Couldn’t get it to start even in safe mode. Did a system recovery which unfortunately restored the computer to factory settings so I lost all my data

My external hard drive is not working. My computer recognises that it is connected to the hard drive and the light goes on and a whirring sounds is heard but nothing appears on the screen. I have two external drive like this.

I have a 1TB Samsung M3 portable hard drive with photos, films and music on it. The PC and a Sony Blu Ray player are not recognising the hard drive when it is connected. When connected to the PC or Blu Ray Player, the blue light comes on the hard drive, then flashes three times, then goes off. The disk then stops spinning. Sometimes the blue light stays on and the disk spins but the computer or blu ray player do not recognise it
I’ve tried a different cable and on 2 different PC’s but still the same problem. I’m not sure if it’s been dropped, been in close proximity to magnets (my son may have played with magnets near it? unlikely though) or whether there is a problem with the driver. I’ve had it about two years. Just before the problem started, I plugged it in at work and my work computer did a ‘scan and fix’ but then said it didn’t need fixing and it opened okay. I work in Putney/Wandsworth so quite near the Data Clinic Chiswick office if that helps.

Recover Deleted Data were able to assist with sorting out the hard drive problems on all the above cases.

UK data recovery experts Datlabs have launched a new look web site for their hard drive recovery business. The growth of the site reflects the growth in their hard drive data recovery business over the last 18 months or so.

I called Datlabs to ask them about their new web site and how they are fairing in the complex world of data recovery. “We have seen a huge upturn in the amount of work being sent in to us where portable and external USB hard drives have broken” said Datlabs tech wizard Ashley Gomes. “Whereas only 5 years ago we would see comparatively few external and portable data storage devices, we now see an increase of almost 5 fold.”

This is a statistic that is common amongst many data recovery companies the world over: external hard drives are just so much more popular these days, and the fact that they are portable means they get lugged around from place to place and get knocked and dropped.

“Inside the casing a hard drive is a very delicate storage device”, continued Gomes, “a jolt or knock can cause real problems with accessibilty, whilst dropping and external hard drive can result in the data being lost forever”.

With the likes of web sites http://thursdaynightblues.com/ and http://harddriveman.com/ reporting on many different types of hard drive fault, Datlabs should be busy, and their new site rocks!

So it seems that Ebay is the latest site in a long line of high profile web sites of well know companies to by hit by a hacker attack.

From memory, we’ve recently had Sony and it’s PlayStation network as well as several online gaming forums being attacked. In my opinion this just shows how vulnerable on line data is. If you use cloud storage for example, you’ll know that all you need to login to your user account is a username and a password. Now a username can be something like your email address and how secure is your password really? Is it a long complex string that mixes alphabetic, numeric and other characters like ‘LFKGjsdjg3293@£$sdhfj’ for example, or is it something like ‘pencil’ ?

There are applications called brute force programs (see Wikipedia link – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_cracking) that will continually bombard web site pages where login details are added in an attempt to gain access to the system. A brute force program is able to attempt an unlimited amount of combinations in order to gain access. It all takes time, but brute force programs can try thousands of combinations a second. Scary isn’t it?

One of the most common passwords is the simple string ‘123456’. People will choose obvious passwords because they are easy to remember, but easy to remember passwords are also easy to break. 123456 became so popular and easy to break that in 2011 Microsoft banned its users using it as a password. So if you do use online services like cloud storage or ebay – make sure your passwords are secure and difficult break.

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.