Hard drive data recovery We get it back.
We have already recovered hundreds of thousands of gigabytes from faulty hard drives — in our own clean room lab in Frankfurt, with a diagnosis before the recovery and your approval before anything happens.
- In-house clean room
- Never outsourced
- Our lab
- Transparent & fair
Precision work at the nanometre scale
Mechanical hard drives are the most widely used storage media in the world. As data density grows, so does complexity: the read heads float only about 3 nm above the magnetic platters — a single speck of dust can cause catastrophic damage. That is why we work with our own clean room, modern tooling, highly trained technicians and an in-house R&D department.
Hard drive / HDD
Whether logical or physical — in most cases the memory is still intact. The diagnosis shows what exactly is wrong.
Logical error
Deleted data or a formatted drive — in most cases the data is still there.
Head crash & mechanics
Clicking, grinding noises or after a drop: the read heads are damaged. Opened only in the clean room.
Electronics & firmware
Drive not recognised, faulty electronics or a firmware error on the board.
Motor failure
The motor no longer starts, the platters do not spin — we replace it in the clean room.
From symptom to cause.
Nobody searches for a fault pattern. You hear a noise or read a message — and the most pressing question is: may I switch the device on one more time?
Symptom
Clicks or ticks in a rhythm
Likely cause
The read-write head can no longer find its track and is repeatedly returned to its starting position. Typical after a drop, but also with wear on the head stack.
What to do now
Switch off immediately and leave it unplugged. Every start-up attempt drags the heads across the platter again.
Symptom
Beeps, hums, does not spin up
Likely cause
The heads are stuck to the surface, or the spindle motor is blocked. The drive tries to start turning and cannot.
What to do now
Cut the power. Do not shake it, do not tap it — the heads can only be released from the platter under visual control.
Symptom
Grinds or scrapes
Likely cause
Head crash: the head touches the magnetic layer and wears it away. The debris damages further tracks.
What to do now
Switch off, immediately. Here seconds of runtime make the difference.
Symptom
Spins normally but is not recognised
Likely cause
Usually the firmware area is damaged — the part invisible to the operating system where the drive keeps its own administration. An electronics fault looks the same from outside.
What to do now
No repair tools, do not initialise. Mechanically everything is fine.
Symptom
Reports the wrong size or an unfamiliar name
Likely cause
The internal translation table between logical address and physical position is damaged.
What to do now
Do not format. The content is there, the route to it is missing.
Symptom
Very slow, copy operations abort
Likely cause
Defective sectors. The drive tries to read every problematic spot several times and blocks for minutes.
What to do now
Do not check it — have it imaged. Every read attempt loads mechanics that are already struggling.
Why this takes so much effort.
No jargon for its own sake — the reasons from which price, duration and prospects of success follow.
Why a donor drive has to be more than “the same model”
In a head swap the complete head stack is replaced. For the new heads to be able to read the existing tracks at all, head count and head map, the preamplifier on the stack, the firmware generation and the production series all have to match. A donor with the same model number but a different series drives the heads with the wrong values — and damages the surface at the first spin-up.
Why the board swap from the internet does not work
A common piece of advice that has not held for a good fifteen years: modern hard drives store individual calibration values in a chip on their own board. Those values belong to that one drive. If only the board is swapped without transferring them, the drive stays unreadable — and the firmware area can take additional damage.
Firmware area and translation table
Every hard drive reserves an area the operating system never gets to see. It holds firmware modules, defect lists and the table that translates logical addresses into physical positions. If this area is damaged, a mechanically flawless drive reports the wrong capacity, an unfamiliar name or nothing at all. That is not repaired at the file system but one level below — with tools that put the drive into a factory mode.
Overlapping tracks (SMR)
To fit in more capacity, many large drives write their tracks overlapping like roof tiles. That increases density but turns every change into a rewrite of whole zones — the drive has to tidy up constantly in the background. For a recovery that means such drives have to be prevented from continuing to work during imaging, and their administration is considerably more complex than on conventionally written drives.
Helium-filled drives
Very large drives are filled with helium and hermetically sealed. The lower drag allows thinner platters and tighter spacing — and makes opening them an intervention after which the original operating conditions no longer apply. Such cases are assessed individually.
File systems and interfaces
Whether NTFS, exFAT, APFS, HFS+, ext4 or ReFS, whether SATA, SAS or an external USB enclosure: for the recovery it only matters in the second phase. First comes getting a complete image at all — the structure inside it is reconstructed afterwards on that image.
Before you do anything.
Bring the medium in or send it to us. The Economy diagnosis is free — you find out what is possible before anything costs money.
Take the medium out of service immediately — every further use can accelerate the loss.
No recovery attempts with tools from the internet.
Do not open the device or medium yourself.
Take it to a reliable data recovery specialist — analysis first, then a quote.
The mistakes that make it expensive.
Almost every well-meant reflex makes the damage worse. That is why you find not only the rule here but also the reason — nobody follows an instruction without one.
Do not switch on repeatedly to see whether it works again.
With mechanical damage every start-up attempt is another pass of the damaged head over the data surface.
No chkdsk and no disk repair.
These tools write. They rebuild the table of contents from already damaged information and overwrite the references from which the files could otherwise be reconstructed.
No cloning with standard tools when there are defective sectors.
Ordinary copy tools repeat read attempts endlessly and hold the mechanics for hours at the same problematic spot.
Do not open the enclosure.
The head floats a few nanometres above the platter. A speck of dust is many times that.
Do not swap the board for one from an identical drive.
Without transferring the individual calibration values the drive does not become readable — and the firmware area can be damaged as well.
Do not freeze it.
A forum myth from the nineties. Thawing creates condensation inside, exactly where it must not be.
Fixed prices by fault pattern.
All prices are plus the diagnostic tariff you choose. Before every recovery you receive a written quote.
Logical error
299 €
Deleted data or a formatted hard drive.
Physical damage
899 €
up to 2 TB
Not recognised, clicking, dropped, grinding noises, electronics or firmware defect, motor does not start. Plus €100 per additional 2 TB.
Total damage
individual
Breakage, fire or water damage, previous third-party intervention or irreparable electronics defects.
Our diagnostic tariffs.
You set the pace. Shipping both ways is included in every tariff — from Standard upwards we collect from you. And you always get a written quote before we start the recovery.
Economy
0 €
free diagnosis
- Diagnosis
- approx. 5 working days
- After approval
- Regular queue
- Updates
- By email
Written quote · free shipping both ways
Standard
99 €
incl. VAT · per medium
- Diagnosis
- within 2 working days
- After approval
- Scheduled with priority
- Updates
- Email and phone call
Written quote · free collection and return
Emergency
249 €
incl. VAT · per medium
- Diagnosis
- next working day
- After approval
- Moved to the front
- Updates
- Named contact
Written quote · express collection and return. Arrives before 12 noon: diagnosis the same working day.
The Economy diagnosis is free of charge. With Standard and Emergency the diagnostic fee applies even if you decline the quote — it is not offset against a later recovery. Either way, you decide freely after the quote whether we continue.
Four steps to your data.
- 01
Send it in or drop it off
Order online or hand it in without an appointment in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen.
- 02
Diagnosis
We examine the medium and send you a written quote.
- 03
Approval & recovery
We only begin the recovery once you have approved it.
- 04
Your data back
On a storage medium in the parcel or via an encrypted cloud download.
Where even we reach a limit
A hard drive is a mechanical device, and mechanical damage cannot be undone. What we can recover depends on how much data surface is still intact.
Magnetic layer worn away over a large area
Where the coating is missing there is no carrier left to read from. Most common cause: a clicking drive that was left running for hours.
Overwritten areas
If writing to the drive continued after the loss, there is nothing left to retrieve in those places.
No matching donor available
With very old or very rare series, sourcing a suitable donor drive can fail or become uneconomical.
Encrypted without a key
If the drive is encrypted and the recovery key cannot be found, the work ends at the encryption — even with flawlessly recovered hardware.
Answered briefly.
What does data recovery cost?
We work with transparent fixed prices based on the fault pattern — depending on the medium from €99, €299 or €499; in cases of total damage individually. Before every recovery you receive a written quote and decide freely whether we continue.
Do I pay even if no data is recovered?
The Economy diagnosis is free — if you decline afterwards, no costs arise. With Standard and Emergency the diagnostic fee (€99 or €249) applies even if you decline; it is not offset against a later recovery. The recovery itself is only charged after your approval.
How long does it take?
Depending on the tariff, the diagnosis takes about 5 working days (Economy), 2 working days (Standard) or one working day (Emergency) — with Emergency, the same working day if the medium arrives before 12 noon. How long the recovery itself takes depends on the fault pattern and is stated in the quote.
Is my data safe with you?
Yes. We work in line with the GDPR, pass nothing on to third parties and never outsource. Your data is stored exclusively on our encrypted server and completely deleted after handover.
Can I send the medium in?
Yes. Shipping both ways is included in every diagnosis tariff; with Standard and Emergency we collect the medium from you. Or you come to our lab in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen without an appointment.
My hard drive is clicking. Can I connect it once more to copy something quickly?
No. Clicking means the head can no longer find its track. Every further start drags it across the platter again — that turns a head fault into surface damage, which is the most demanding form of data recovery.
The drive is still under warranty. Should I exchange it first?
Not if the data matters to you. A warranty exchange gives you a new drive — your data stays in the old one and is gone with it. Recover first, then exchange.
Why does an 8 TB drive cost more than a 1 TB drive?
Because the work grows with capacity: more platters mean more heads that have to match, and a sector-by-sector image takes many times longer. Hence the surcharge per further 2 TB.
Can I remove my external hard drive from its enclosure and send only the bare drive?
Please do not. With external drives the electronics in the enclosure are often the source of the fault, and some models encrypt via exactly that board. Send the complete device.
Data Recovery Professionals
A worldwide group of independent, owner-run data recovery companies. Members share methods from professional data recovery, forensics and software development — so on rare damage patterns the knowledge of the whole group stands behind your medium.
Every hour counts. Let us talk.
Bring the medium in or send it to us. The Economy diagnosis is free of charge.
Wasserweg 8–10 · 60594 Frankfurt am Main