External Hard Drive Data Recovery

If your external hard drive has failed we can get your valuable data back (even if it has been condemned as “dead” by your computer support people) using our external hard drive data recovery service.  Tierra Data Recovery’s experienced data recovery engineers rescue data from all makes and models of external hard drive including Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, Toshiba and LaCie. You can check our recovery prices here.

We offer FREE collection from your door and professional analysis of your external hard drive allowing quick diagnosis.  Analysis is charged at £32.50 ex VAT (£39.00 inc VAT).  This is deducted from the cost of recovery.

Standard Service analysis is completed within around 2 working days meaning you will know the results quickly.

We have an outstanding level of recovered data.

You only pay for recovery when you are sure the data you need has been recovered.

External hard drives have become the de facto device for back ups for home users and small to medium businesses. Our experience in many cases is that there can be confusion about the term “back up”. Often, users feel that moving a file to an external from their computer is a “back up”, but this is simply moving a critical file from one vulnerable place to a different, more vulnerable place. A file is not backed up until it exists in at least two places. Amazing as it seems, we do see recovery jobs from companies that have lost data because both the main computer and the external drive have failed at the same time – when that happens, we analyse the hard drives from both devices.

Why External Hard Drive Data Recovery Is Needed

One of the most distressing parts of external hard drive data recovery for many people is the sudden nature of the loss of access to data. By their nature, they tend to contain recent data relevant to the current computer use of the owner. External drives are extremely prone to sudden impact while powered up and spinning – either from being yanked off a height onto the floor, or (unbelievably) falling to a horizontal position from a vertical position. This latter issue is surprisingly widespread and is encouraged by manufacturers designing external drives to function while “standing up”. This is an inherently dangerous position for a device which is so vulnerable to the effects of movement while in operation.

Examples of vulnerable upright external hard drives

All external hard drives are vulnerable to data loss, even more than internal drives, due to the potential for movement and the inherent possibility of changes in environmental conditions. Once simple attempts to access the data have failed you and your back ups do not have your critical files, external hard drive data recovery is the only way to get the data back.

Common symptoms of external hard drive failure include:

• clicking
• external hard drive not seen in BIOS
• external hard drive does not spin up
• external drive spins but makes unusual noises

Whatever symptoms your external has Tierra Data Recovery possesses the specialist knowledge and equipment to carry out an external hard drive data recovery. Of course, sometimes we are called in too late and the data has already been destroyed permanently – we will help you identify this as quickly as possible.

External drives are essentially protective sleeves for quite ordinary desktop or laptop hard drives inside. Hard drive manufacturers sell external drives with their own brand internal hard drive inside (such as Seagate or Western Digital), but everybody else has to buy in hard drives made by somebody else (e.g. Iomega, Freecom, LaCie, Buffalo and most others). Typically, there is an additional PCB (electronic circuit board) added by the assembler of the external hard drive, for driving the various lights, logos and other indicators.

Do You Really Need External Hard Drive Data Recovery?

We are sometimes asked how far an end-user should go in testing an external hard drive before calling us in to help. The difficulty is in determining that there is a fault within the hard drive itself rather than the external enclosure. You now know that there is an ordinary hard drive inside the external enclosure, so the test that your local computer shop or IT maintenance staff will perform is to remove the internal hard drive and stick it into a simple USB external enclosure (you can get these from PC World for around £35, or here’s an example from Amazon). The test is simple. If the test PC can recognise that there is a USB device attached, but cannot see the hard drive inside it, there is a physical problem with the hard drive and you need our help. If the drive can be accessed, they can transfer your data off – you do not need our help. If they cannot see your data, you need our help – you may have a partial physical issue. Get in touch with us using the contact sheet or call us now on 0845 094 0027 or 0131 663 4137.

Some newer models of pocket external drives cut manufacturing costs by omitting the use of an additional PCB (and subsequent light show). These are lighter, simpler and tend to be more reliable as there are fewer parts to go wrong. The clever bit is that the internal hard drive has an alternative data interface built in – instead of a conventional PATA or SATA interface, it has a direct micro-USB interface. At Tierra, we developed techniques for working with these types of hard drive. There is no point in you putting these into an external caddy for a test – in this instance, the external enclosure does nothing more than a sweet-wrapper would. If a computer does not recognise this hard drive when connected, it has a physical problem and you need our help.

Western Digital My Passport with USB interface on drive PCB

Brands Suitable for External Hard Drive Recovery

Here is a partial list of external hard drives we can recover data from:

• Buffalo
• Formac
• Freecom
• G-Tech
• Hewlett Packard
• Hitachi
• Hypertec
• i-nique
• IBM
• Icybox
• iGadgitz
• Integral
• Intenso
• Iomega
• iStorage
• LaCie
• Lenovo
• Linksys
• LUPO
• Maxell
• Maxtor
• MEMUP
• MyVolts
• Netac
• Platinum
• Plextor
• Samsung
• Seagate
• Startech
• Stor-Right
• Storage Appliance Corporation
• Sumvision Apex
• TeckNet
• Toshiba
• Trekstor GmbH
• Verbatim

We are experts in external hard drive data recovery, so do not risk your precious data anywhere else, give us a call on 0845 094 0027 or 0131 663 4137.