Recently Asked Questions
Real questions from real customers - crashed RAID servers, clicking hard drives, dropped laptops and more - along with the advice our engineers gave them. For general questions about our service, see our FAQs.
Customer Recovery Scenarios
A Dell RAID 5 server with 5 SATA drives crashed, with two drives not spinning and missing from BIOS - with critical data needed for a board meeting 18 hours away.
A Dell desktop crashes on the Windows XP splash screen and keeps restarting - a sign of bad sectors or logical corruption, not something to fix with a reinstall.
A G4 PowerBook won't load macOS and shows the "sad Mac" icon - a logical or physical hard drive issue that needs a free evaluation to diagnose.
Yes - as long as no new data has been written to the partition since the format took place.
An in-house attempt to rebuild a 4-drive Maxtor RAID 5 array - including reinitialising and repartitioning - made the situation worse before professional recovery stepped in.
A ticking LaCie external drive with disappearing files and a slowing PC - classic signs of bad sectors that call for an immediate power-off.
A grinding, non-spinning Maxtor Diamond drive holding critical business accounts - usually a jammed motor or head issue requiring a cleanroom repair.
Accidental deletion is almost always recoverable, provided the drive isn't used again before the data is retrieved.
A clicking Maxtor DiamondMax drive points to a damaged disk assembly - recoverable as long as the platters themselves are healthy.
Whether your files survive a Windows reinstall depends on whether the partition was formatted first - unformatted reinstalls give much better recovery odds.
A dropped Seagate USB drive that won't mount and makes a soft squeaking noise - likely a jammed motor needing cleanroom evaluation.
When a drive disappears from BIOS entirely it's usually a physical fault that recovery software can't fix - a cleanroom evaluation is the next step.
A Windows XP laptop that won't boot and reports a missing system file - a sign of logical or physical hard drive failure.
A constant clicking sound from a WD800 drive usually points to a head disk assembly fault - power it down and arrange a free evaluation.
Pricing depends on the fault, the operating system and the media's capacity - a fixed quote always follows the free evaluation.
Don't see your situation here?
Every case is different. Check our general FAQs, or speak to a data recovery expert directly for advice specific to your device.