Data Recovery from Dell, HP, Sony, Samsung, Toshiba, Fujitsu
All makes including 2.5"inch and 1.8"inch Notebook hard drives



Common Faults observed in Hard Disk Drives - Failure - Failed - Dead

Blue Screen of Death
We often get laptops that have failed to boot up or partially boot into windows before ending in the Blue Screen Error message. This is commonly known as the Blue Screen of Death or BSOD. We recover the files and folders from such problems.

Hard Drive failing to spin up / small creaking sound
Sometimes the first thing you know is that the hard drive has failed to be found by the laptop BIOS or Operating System is not found. On closer inspection you may find the drive emits a small creaking / groaning sound as though it is trying to spin up but is having trouble. However there is no vibration or hum sound that you would normally hear or feel when it boots up normally. We can fix / repair this problem and recover your data.

Power Surge, Reversed Polarity, Power Supply plugged in the wrong way around
This is a frequent occurence - particularly plugging the power lead in the wrong way around. Despite the shape of the molex connector, the cheaper versions are often made of soft plastic and can easily be plugged in incorrectly. Often this results in the drive appearing totally dead with no noise coming from the motor and an unpleasant burning smell. Similar faults occur when a mains power surge can damage the computer motherbaord and hard drive circuitry. Immediately unplug the computer from the mains supply and withdraw the hard drive to a safe place until recovery can take place.

Hard Disk Drive not seen in BIOS
You may wonder what the BIOS is? BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System and in simple terms it provides a set of instructions to your computer, telling it how to start, and interface to the first 'Boot' device. When it has reached the first boot device, it can receive further instructions from there, and eventually load your operating system. During the start-up, the BIOS may have failed to detect the Hard Drive, and therefore is not shown. First check all connections and try again.

If it still won't work, then the recognition failure may be caused by a number of factors, eg corrupt boot sector, however, at startup on your computer you can tell whether the drive is being seen by the system BIOS. Power up the computer, and look for the on-screen instruction to tell you how to enter the BIOS. Usually this is achieved by pressing F1, F2 or DEL keys. Examine the menus for options on viewing the BIOS IDE peripheral setup and set your BIOS to automatically detect IDE drives. On some BIOSes there is an option to "automatically detect hard drives now". If you run this option and the computer 'hangs' or appears inactive for a a minute or more then it is likely that your Hard Disk Drive had failed to be recognised by the system BIOS.

Repair / Recover fix Electrical / Firmware Hard Diskdrive Problems
Hard Disk Drive not recognised in BIOS. smoking harddrives!

Repair / Recover from following Operating File Systems
Data recovery for FAT FAT32 and NTFS file systems.
Linux with EXT2fs, EXT3, XFS, reiserfs & jfs filesystems on standalone & RAID volumes
Recover from partitions, even if the boot sector or FAT has been erased or damaged
Recover files with the original time and date stamp
Recover files on network drives
Recover from all Win 95, Win 98, Win ME, NT 4.0, Windows™ XP and Windows™ 2000 systems.

Recover / retrieve files in the following situations
- UNC Uncorrectable Data Error - especially Maxtor SATA
- Mains Power Surge
- Reversed power polarity / voltage from incorrectly plugging in power leads or cable
- Corruption of file systems FAT
- Corrupt Files
- Recycle Bin emptied or files were deleted without Recycle Bin
- Hardware or software failures
- Power failure
- HDD (Hard Disk Drive) not recognised in BIOS, computer not detecting harddiscs
- Virus attack
- Formatted Hard drives
- System shutdown
- Partitioning or boot-up sector problems
- Controller pcb Board failure / burnt
- No spin on diskdrive motor
- Forgotten or Lost Password removal from Hard Disk