Computer Services

Hard Drive Data Recovery

Computer Service offers a data recovery service where we will try to recover data from your hard drive using specialist software. This service can be used for external hard drives, boot hard drives, USB drives - anything that appears as a hard drive in (My) Computer we can try recovery on, with the exception of network drives and Internet drives (ie DropBox, OneDrive, etc).

If Windows says your drive is unformatted, the data it holds is probably still there (this doesn't apply to network/internet drives). We can usually get it back - this service may also be of interest to you if you have deleted data by accident, because the files are not actually deleted - the space they take up on the drive is simply marked as being available.

Our software scans your drive at a physical level looking for data that Windows says doesn't exist. Even if you wipe a drive multiple times from Windows, data is still recoverable. Our software will attempt to recover it, from a starting price of £40.

Please be advised, due to the nature of data recovery, we do not guarantee any recovered data is readable or usable, nor do we guarantee to recover any data at all. Depending on the nature of the damage (if any) to the drive it may not be possible to recover the original filenames or the folders they were in - they may end up with their Master File Table entry as a filename instead. If your drive is making clicking noises it has or it soon will suffer a total mechanical failure.

We do have the ability to send your drive away for professional data recovery, where technicians take the drive to pieces in a dust-free environment and attempt to extract data from what's called the platters of the drive where the data is kept. This service is not cheap, your drive could be away for many weeks and we cannot guarantee any data can be recovered.

Please note we cannot support or condone various "data recovery" methods that you may have read on the Internet. Swapping drive firmware chips between identical drives and putting hard drives in the freezer temporary fixes only if they work, and Computer Service recommends replacing the drive in question.