Posts Tagged ‘hard drive’

Datlabs Hard Drive Recovery

Tuesday, February 4th, 2020

Datlabs data recovery logoI have a Seagate Backup Plus 5 TB external hardrive that stopped working, making a clicking /buzzing sound. The data on it isn’t critical but I would like toe recovery it if it’s not too expensive. I sent it to Datlabs hard drive recovery who got my data files back for me. Here are some other examples where they were able to retrieve the data.

We have been having problems with my laptop over heating. Recently my husband attempted to burn a disc unsuccessfully. The computer simply shut down and down we are not able to boot up. My IT colleague at work took a look at it, and he thinks it sounds like the platters are stuck. How much would I be looking at to get my data recovered? It is just general personal files and photographs.

Datlabs phone data recovery

In august my samsung phone just switched to emergency calls (whilst i was hospital) asking for a passward. All the passwords i know dont work my samsung account password and screen lock password and all other passwords. This phone has my babys first photos and my scan app bumpies which im desperate to recover, im not too bothered about anything else. Please can you help

I have an iPhone that has started and update but as there wasn’t enough space available to complete the update I have been told by the iPhone store the phone will need a restore resulting in loosing photos that are not saved to the iCloud. Are the photos able to be recovered. Can Datlabs recovery my photos?

Samsung S6. No power at all and not showing up when connected to PC. Took it to a Datlabs and they said there is an issue with the video/graphics element. It has a passcode to unlock it. Need to recover all data.

Lost text messages on HTC and Galaxy

Sunday, April 8th, 2018

What are the most valuable items of data on a mobile phone? For the owners of HTC M8 and Samsung Galaxy S7 phones, the answer seems to be lost text messages. Here are two examples:

recovering deleted and lost text messagesAbout 3 weeks ago I lost some text messages from my mobile phone (HTC M8). I don’t recall deleting it, perhaps I did without knowing. I never backup my data. I’m only interested in lost data of one contact that’s all.
Please let me know if you able to help?
I live close to Data Clinic’s Lombard St centre in London I’m happy to take there if someone wants to have a look at my device. I also have the data stored on a broken hard drive so I’ll bring that in too and hopefully you can get the data off of it.

I have got an old, broken galaxy s7 edge that has some photos and text messages on it that I would really like to retrieve, problem is that the phone is bricked, the screen is broken, the battery is dead (as in not chargeable dead), the charging/data port is broken, the list goes on. I’m just hoping to get my old photos back, and would like a quote if thats okay. Just a heads up, I probably won’t be able to answer a call back in business hours just due to my job (having seen the button that says request call back) so if you could pop me an email to the address provided instead, that would be brilliant.

When attempting to retrieve text messages from phone’s the still turn on the best way forward is to try a software extraction process. This can be done by downloading some software from the internet that will do the job for you. However, if your phone no longer turns on then you’ll need to get the assistance of a phone data recovery company to help you. These companies are able to read the text message data from the memory chips on your phone, even if it no longer switches on.

Often in legal cases it’s necessary to extract messages and data from phone where those messages have been lost or deleted, a data recovery company who are also experts in extracting text messages (whether deleted or not) are Data Clinic – you can read their phone data recovery services page here 1 and their phone data extraction (investigative forensics services) page here 2.

Need data from hard drive and tape

Saturday, November 18th, 2017

I’ve had several hard drives and old backup tapes fail recently – I’ve documented the details of the problems below.

Hard drives failed
Windows booted and gave me a disk read error, tried to repair using windows 10 recovery image via usb which failed. Installed a new copy of windows 10 on another hard drive and ran chkdsk /r on the faulty HD. In the windows explorer menu for my computer I see the file is 0 bytes (it’s a 1tb hard drive) chkdsk has been running for 3 days with an ETA of 150hours. Kind of am giving up hope need data recovered…

We plugged in the HDD on the wrong voltage setting and now it won’t work.

many hard drives

I have had my IOMEGA external hard drive for 8 years. I recently tried to plug it in and it says the hard drive must be formatted.

2TB LaCie External Disk Drive not being properly recognised by operating system when plugged in via USB, despite trying with multiple laptops (Windows and Mac). I carefully removed the Seagate drive from its LaCie enclosure and placed in a PC but the BIOS would not detect it. To my knowledge, the drive has not been subjected to any shocks or drops. However, it does make a faint beep noise when plugged in (be it via SATA or USB enclosure).

The hard drive is ticking regularly, when I try to open it, I receive an IO error. It is an ext4, old external 500Gb, w/ approximatelly 100Gb of Data

I dropped my 2TB Seagate back up harddrive, and now it isn’t being recognized by my computer. It makes a beeping noise and a clicking noise.

Seagate freeAgent external hard drive is being recognised by my Mac but running so slowly that I cannot transfer files over (recently got new laptop and wanted to transfer music and photos)
E.g. it takes around an hour to open a folder and I tried to transfer one folder of photos from external hard drive to laptop and this failed after 48 hours.

Need data back from tape
The external hard drive has been dropped and now no longer is picked up by computer. Its first spins and then after 15 seconds it makes two clicks and stops spinning.

I have three backup tapes from 1990. They are 3M: two DC 600A and one DC 300 XL/P. They are undamaged, so I guess that if you have an appropriate tape drive and can read the byte order, they should be easy.

We have an issue with a number of tapes that are either corrupted or physically damaged (snapped). These are DDS3 and DDS4 tapes. Are you able to give a high level indication of cost for recovery per tape?

I have a DAT / DDS Retrospect backup that I need restored. Is this something you can do and if so what would it cost ( a single tape?)

Actions
I’m currently working on getting the data back from several of these devices – If you’d like me to help you recover the data from your hard drive or tape the price per recover is approximately £300 – £600 depending on the fault with the device. I’ll update readers of this blog with news in future posts.

Beeping and clicking hard drives

Monday, October 16th, 2017

Hard drive beeps
I’ve turned my PC on this morning along with my 2TB Seagate Barracuda external hard drive to find that it was powering on for about 5 seconds, made a short beeping noise and then powered down. I’ve tried in different USB ports but still the same problem. I opened Disk Management and it saw the disk but it was showing a Partition of about 3GB, that was it. It then came up with a Cyclic Redundancy Check error. At the moment I am absolutely devastated as this housed about 8 years worth of photo’s/music and other extremely important files. Schoolboy error on my part not having a backup.

Seagate 2 TB external hard drive is not being detected and gives a beep sound when plugged on.

I have a Seagate external hardrive (Plus Ultra Slim 2 TB USB 3.0 Portable 2.5 inch). It’s suddenly stopped connecting to my mac and makes a beeping sound when plugged in. There is no super essential data on there but If it could be repaired and I could retrieve the data that would be great. What’s the cost of repairing this? Is it possible to come into your dataclinic in Hackney

beeping hard drive picture

Barracuda clicks
My Seagate Barracude 2000 Gb HDD (model: ST2000DM001) started to make clicking sounds. Initially it was booting correctly but before I copied all the files, it stopped working. I couldn’t boot my computer with this disk connected so I had to unplug it (I have dual boot PC).

The hard drive was in use when it was hit. It’s a seagate 1TB hard drive. A ticking noise started after it was hit and so I turned off the MacBook. It can no longer be seen by the MacBook.

Seagate ST1000LM014 1EJ164-038 FW:DEMA WU (100535602 M) 1000gb 2.5″ Sata PCB sshd. drive cand start and can hear short sound all the time. looks like motor is unable to start. adout 500gb data to recover

I have a 80 gb desktop hdd which has just stoped working and will not boot or show in bios it started ticking a few weeks b4 but then it did not tick for a week then did not turn on after that

I have a small Seagate NAS (1 terabyte) that was bumped over and fell onto the desk when I was changing computers. It basically got it’s reader arm locked up. So the data needs to be recovered. It really probably doesn’t contain all that much data, but some of my work stuff, and personal family photos I don’t want to lose, as well as old financial data.

Hard Disk and Phone Help

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2017

Western Digital External Hard Drive, being partially recognised by a PC but getting the error “Disk inaccessible. IO error“, the disk also appears to be making a quiet ticking noise.

Lost files on Microsoft Surface Pro 4

I wanted to enquire whether you are able to extract files from very old PCs please? We have two old PCs running Windows 2000 and would just like to have all of the files on the hard drives transferred to a USB stick so that we can dispose of the computers.

Lost Photo/Video files that are of great importance on Macbook, think they’ve potentially been deleted, how much does it cost to recover?

hdd

I have a samsung harddrive that has been dropped and no longer works. I am in urgent need to recover the photos and videos as they are the only copies of my sons entire life that i have.

Western Digital Passport. Unable to access file, due to connection issue

My Seagate 1TB hard drive is no longer being picked up by my Macbook. I also tried it on a PC. The hard drive powers up, lights come on but then there is loud clicking sounds for roughly 10 seconds and then silence.

I recently deleted the camera collection file on my One Plus 3T and would very much like to recover all the photos (as it contained all photos since february!!) there should be just over 1000 photos and they have not been backed up because I am an imbecile

The USB Hard Drive in question is my father’s and is probably approx 5 years old
He had used the drive as his main or back up drive for his photos, unfortunately his iMac had some kind of issue and when resolved it had be refreshed, so this drive may or may not have been connected during these issues
When the drive is connected (I’ve not tried 4 different machines, Mac and PC) the drive appears in the directory (Freecom device). I can also right click and see ‘get info’ which tells me there is approx 100 GB of data on the 250 GB).
However, I can’t fidn any way to see any contents in the drive, it is always completely empty, no files or folders

I have an external hard drive that used to be a MacBook drive that’s had some damage to the USB connector. The actual drive itself seems to be okay, I just can’t access anything because of the USB.

Vodafone Smart Ultra 6. Need data recovering from Internal storage chip. Motherboard is dead/not able to power on. verified by a phone engineer.
Is it possible for you to recover data.
Advised when I called in this evening “Elliot” would know if it’s possible to recover it.

Buffalo Hard Drive Fault

Wednesday, June 21st, 2017

This month I’ve had a spate of enquiries about faulty Buffalo hard drives. IMO any hard drive that produces ticking or buzzing sounds should be sent to a data recovery company. Don’t try and fix it yourself !

My hard drive produces a clicking/ticking noise when turned on. This happens no matter how many times I reset it. It’s a Buffalo branded external hard drive.

hard drive exposedMy daughter is taking A-Level exams and has kept her work on a USB stick. She has plugged it into her Mac tonight and the system is saying that there is an error. (She did not back her work up! aggghh).
We have tried various fixes but none seem to work.
The work that is on the USB needs to handed in by Tuesday afternoon at the latest.
I know it is a big ask but is it possible to recover the work at such short notice? If so, I would be able to drop the USB of at Geldard Road, Leeds when you open at 8am for possible recovery?

My external Buffalo harddrive will no longer show up on my computer but I have hundreds of photos on there that I would really like to retrieve if possible. Please can I send it to you to see if anything can be done?

My hard drive no longer mounts on both Mac and Window platforms. The cable is relatively new and I tried the different USB ports available to me. It did mount temporarily a few days ago on my windows 10 tablet but its connection sporadically cut out by itself. Now it no longer mounts. It is still receiving power once connected as I can hear and feel the drive whirring. It’s a portable Buffalo type.

Hard drive was accidentally formatted and as a result all files are no longer accessible. I tried running a recovery and was able to see the files but unable to recover them as I wasn’t confident of what I was doing and didn’t want to lose the files.

Samsung S4 Mini is completely unresponsive, although when connected to a computer the computer does recognise the phone as an “unkown device” with an error message being displayed saying (“one of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned, and windows does not recognise it”). I would like to make an enquiry to recover my personal data / photo’s directly from the phones memory if this is possible?

London Data Recovery

Monday, November 21st, 2016

Here’s a question that came into us asking about the services of hard drive specialists Data Clinic Ltd. It sounds to us like the folks at this diy data recovery site may be able to help too, but if you want to use Data Clinic, their London address is on Lombard Street – EC3V 9LJ

Hello i’m a student living in London.
– I have a Seagate 1tb external hard drive which broke on the 12th of November.
– The light on my hard drive does not turn on.
– The hard drive isn’t recognized so therefore I can not access my files.
– When I connect it to my computer through usb it clicks for about 40 seconds and stops making any noise altogether.
-There isn’t a huge amount on the hard drive but it is of great value to me.
I am a student and I am working full time. I really am on a budget. I would like to think that this is a small job for ‘dataclinic’. If you could quote me the probable price and recovery time, that would be great.

wd blueAnd another quote question too:
I am looking for donor drive WD10SPCX (or just heads), do you have any? How much does is cost?

Our advice is to stay away from buying hard drives of the same model for data recovery purposes unless you are sure you know what you are doing. If fixing a busted hard drive by buying the same model and swapping the control board was all you had to do there wouldn’t be data recovery companies. So be careful as you’ll be wasting a lot of money.

The costs of data recovery can vary considerably depending on the type of drive – don’t forget there are SSD’s as well as HDD’s now!, and the fault with it – data problems, unresponsive drives, dead drives, noisy ‘clicking’ drives are all different faults that are fixed differently and varying in cost.

Getting Data Back

Friday, October 14th, 2016

Get Back CCTV Image Data

Question: “We have a criminal case and we have a major problem. We have a digital cctv recorder. The footage we needed was recorded on the 2 of September when I called the engineer to tape the footage it said we could no longer go back to that date. Is there anyway we can retrieve that footage? I would greatly appreciate it. I’m feeling so stressed about this hopefully you can help.”

Answer: The likelihood of recovering data from CCTV recorders like this is very slim. This is because this equipment records on a continuous loop, continually overwriting the older data on the hard drive. In this case I believe the data you want to recover has been completely overwritten. This is common thing.If you have data from a CCTV system that you want saved its important to switch the CCTV recorder off so that it can’t overwrite any of the recordings you want back.

500GB Harddrive Not Appearing

Question: Have a seagate 500GB harddrive, used it a week ago and was perfectly fine. Tried to plug it in yesterday however nothing appeared on my Mac. Tried a windows and still the same. Windows makes sound when plug in. The light appears on device then flashes for a bit and then stops and goes back to just the light. It makes a heart beat type of sound when plugged in, such as it’s trying to do something but keeps getting caught. Really need the data on the device.

Transcend Store Jet harddrive

A 1TB Transcend Store Jet hard drive

Answer: The noise your Windows system makes when you plug your hard drive in is that of a USB device being recognised. There’s a subtle difference here – the noise is NOT your hard drive being recognised, rather it’s only the USB interface being recognised. I therefore suspect that you have a harddrive problem. The heart beat sound you mention when the harddrive is connected is probably similar to the repetitive clicking sound that most people report when their hard drive does not appear. This sound indicates a serious hard drive problem, and getting the data back from these fault requires engaging a skilful data recovery company who will be able to extract the data from the harddrive.

Transcend StoreJet Stopped Working

Question: My external hard drive (1TB Transcend StoreJet) has recently stopped working. Every time I plug it in to a computer it turns on, but says drivers have failed to install and thus it can’t be accessed.
I wanted to know how long does it normally take for you to examine a hard drive and recover data?
Please email me back. Your help is greatly appreciated.

Answer: This could be a problem with the drivers rather than a problem with the external hard drive. My first recommendation would be to plug the hard drive into a Mac and see what happens. Mac’s don’t use drivers as such and therefore plugging to device into a Mac should get past this problem. If the hard drive still fails to show up then you will have a faulty hard drive. Don’t worry if that hard drive shows up and you are unable to read it. Incompatabilites between Windows and Mac systems exist and you might not be able to read the data from the hard drive BUT you it will show up on the system.

Questions about Broken Hard Drives

Friday, September 23rd, 2016

In this post we look at three example hard drive problems and give recommendations on identifying the problem and applying the solution to extract the data from the hard drive.

Is Hard Drive Repair Worth It ?
My external hard drive is clicking and not connecting to my macbook so I know it is broken, I do not want a data recovery if possible to avoid it as I’m just wanting the hard drive fixed. I am wondering if you’s fix external hard drives? Thank you.

It’s not really financially worth fixing a hard drive. As hard drives are so cheap to buy, it works out more expensive to fix them than it would be to buy a brand new one. So, if you don’t need to data recovering from your busted hard drive, just buy a new one instead. You’ll get a warranty with it too.

Hard Drive Not Being Found
I have a Seagate 1gb usb hard drive. The light is still lit up when connected to computer, I have brought a new lead just in case it was that, unfortunately it is not being found on any computer. What do I need to do to get the drive to work?

Buying a new lead was a good idea as sometimes that’s all the problem is. Now that you’ve done that and eliminated the lead it’s worth eliminating the external case. Remove the hard drive from the casing and hook it us directly to your computer using a USB to SATA cable. If that works then obviously the case is at fault. If the hard drive is still not being found then the conclusion is that there is a fault on the hard drive. There are some things you can do yourself to try and repaid your hard drive – go and take a look at the http://www.recover-deleted-data.co.uk/ web resource for some good tips of getting the information of off broken hard drives.

Getting the Data off a Packard Bell
I would like quote for the cost of recovering data off a Packard Bell Store & Save hard disk drive Model No H2D2U2 6948820100, particularly the family photos.

You don’t actually say what the failure with your hard drive actually is. Can you provide any more information ? In the above question I mention the Recover Deleted Data web resource – I recommend that you take a look at this site as well, you may be able to find what the problem is with you hard drive and read the advice on getting the data off of it too.

All Flash Data Centres?

Monday, September 8th, 2014

Will we ever see data centres where spinning hard disk drives (HDDs) have been replaced by flash hard drives (SSDs) ?

Flash memory (SSD)The answer is probably, but according to this news article it won’t be for time yet. The problem is multi faceted, but much of the big issue revolves around the cost of producing SSD flash media when compared against the same process for HDD manufacture. Hard drives of the HDD variety have been around a long time and they are mechanical devices that rotate – this means that to rotate them they have to have a constant power supply which keeps them spinning at exactly the correct speed. For data centres that have many thousands of hard disks this is a big deal as the costs of keeping the HDDs spinning is considerable. Then there is the heat issue too – thousands of rotating HDDs produce a lot of heat that has to dissipated – usually an elaborate air conditioning system is used to effectively transport the generated heat away from the the hard drives. This means more money is spent.

Helium hard drives have been developed that produced less heat and are able to store more and these are getting into data centres but their cost is higher than standard HDDs. SSDs are also made from rare earth materials so there is a finite supply which keeps the price high.