Our data recovery team have been hard at work, and managed to successfully recover over 200GB of data from a damaged Toshiba hard drive.

The client phoned our data recovery team to see if they could be of assistance, as her laptop was not powering up. In the days prior to her failing, she reported hearing a clicking and beeping noise coming from within the machine. She removed the hard drive and sent into our Cardiff office with its unique job reference number. Upon arrival, the hard drive was catalogued and immediately sent over to our data recovery team for a free diagnosis.

Our data recovery team immediately began trying to ascertain the cause of the hard drive failure. The hard drive was disassembled in our class 100 data recovery clean room. All physical data recovery is undertaken in a clean room environment, to ensure the contaminant-free environment. The data recovery team found some damage to the platters and heads, and it was clear the hard drive had suffered from a head crash, particularly since the client had described hearing a clicking and beeping noise prior to failure. The client was given a no-obligation quote, which was accepted, and our data recovery team sourced an identical hard drive from our library of spare parts. Around 80% of the client’s data was recovered, totalling around 200GB; a secure link was sent and this was downloaded via FTP.

It’s important to recognise what noises a hard drive should and shouldn’t make. When a mechanical hard disk drive is powered up, you will normally hear a short burst of humming as the spindle motor begins to whir into action; there will also be some slight clicking-type sounds as the read/write heads move into position. However, after this point, your hard drive should just emit a low-level humming noise as the platters spin, with the occasional ticking noise as operations are performed and the heads move position. If you hear a regular clicking, beeping, scratching or grinding noise, this is likely to be indicative of a physical fault with your drive, such as a head crash or motor failure. In this instance, immediately power down your drive and consult a professional data recovery specialist. Keeping the drive running risks the chance of your data becoming unrecoverable.