Hundreds of people in Glasgow search for hard drive repair each month. Most of these people do not want the hard drive back; they want their files on it back. Until this distinction determines where you take your drive and what happens to your files there, this may seem like a fine point.
When a drive fails, the word 'repair' comes naturally, like your car or boiler. However, the hard drive itself is only a £50 container that holds irreplaceable content. The real questions aren't can this drive be fixed? but rather will all of its content move safely to another location? These two jobs require different professions to complete them correctly. Taking a failed drive to the wrong profession results in losing data as a result of trying to fix the drive.
Repairing a machine means fixing the machine itself; if you have a bad drive in your computer, a computer repair shop will replace it with a good drive and install Windows again, a true fix to the machine itself. The data on your old drive does not figure into this process. Data recovery is the opposite: the machine is irrelevant, the contents are everything.
This is the portion of the content that most web sites don't have the courage to clearly state: we are repairing failed hard drives at our workbench each week. Stuck or seized mechanical parts are replaced using a matching donor head assembly. The dead circuit board is replaced using a donor PCB which has the original ROM chip transferred. A corrupted firmware can be rebuilt in the service area of the hard drive. This is an example of repair by any definition.
It's also a restoration with an intentionally limited warranty: long enough to read the drive once. Once we've created a complete backup of all of your data on some other healthy storage media then the patient is done. A device which has previously failed and was recovered is certainly not something you should entrust as the only copy of anything; the repair bought a reading window, not a second life, and pretending otherwise is how people lose the same data twice.
Honestly: almost never. The cost of a brand-new drive will always be less than the value of a professional's time for about an hour. A new drive comes with a manufacturer's warranty and has no known history of failure. A "fixed" drive doesn't offer you any of that: used heads in a drive which had a head failure have used up all but maybe a few hours before the next failure. Also, as long as the sectors are being successfully reallocated to cover failures, the count only goes in one direction. And, even though SMART says everything is OK, the message from SMART is notoriously late. Drives will pass their own health checks until the very last minute before failing.
In all honesty, this is what the job should look like: recover the lost data to new media, decommission (retire) the failing hardware, and use the money spent on repair to create an extra set of important information. If someone tells you they will "make your bad hard drive good as new" for continued usage... they are going to sell you the next big data loss.
The three questions that will help to quickly narrow down your options for whoever you send your failed drive to in Glasgow (including ourselves) are: "Will you image it prior to attempting anything?" A copy-first mentality is a professional reaction while working on the original is an amateur approach. "Who will perform the work?" The only acceptable response is their engineers, as long as they are performing the work in house. Any other response (such as sending it to a third party lab you have never met with) is unacceptable. "What am I going to get charged if you fail?" On most single-drive jobs the correct answer will be nothing.
All of our responses will be on the public record: always an image first; in house recovery (we do all the work ourselves), always; and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Our standard cost for recovering your lost data is £300 + VAT. This is fixed in writing once we have done a free diagnostic. If your hard drive has started making a clicking or grinding noise, there really isn't much point in looking elsewhere. First switch it off. That is the only thing we cannot delay fixing.
Whatever failed (mechanical, electrical, firmware), we will fix it just enough to retrieve your data and then retire that hard disk with pride. Free diagnostic; fixed price of £300 + VAT in writing prior to work commencing; and once you have a quote, drop it off at Tay House, or insure the item and post it to us from anywhere.