How to Fix an External Hard Drive
Table Of Contents
show
When your external hard drive breaks down, it’s up to specially-trained experts to safely and reliably make the necessary repairs. Portable external hard drives can fail due to being dropped, or just wear down from overuse. These hard drives may make clicking, beeping, or whirring grinding noises. These noises indicate severe physical problems “under the hood”. There’s only one place you can go to have those problems fixed safely and reliably. At a professional data recovery lab like Gillware, you can find highly-trained hard drive repair specialists who know exactly how to fix an external hard drive.
Some external hard drive repairs are easy. Many external drives have perfectly normal hard disk drives inside them. The drives have a dongle that connects to the drive’s SATA port, with a USB port on the other end. Sometimes, the dongle, not the hard drive, has failed, turning your external drive into a paperweight. And sometimes you can just crack open the casing, unplug the hard drive, and get your data back!
Some external drives, like Western Digital My Book drives, though, have special hardware-level encryption, with the dongle handling encryption and decryption. When the dongle blows out, the data on the hard drive itself is inaccessible without using special data recovery methods.
When the hard drive itself is the problem, few people know how to fix an external hard drive. Even fewer have the proper equipment needed to do so. Opening up a hard disk drive anywhere but in a HDD factory or professional data recovery lab can cause permanent data loss. As a result, hard drive repairs must happen inside professional data recovery labs with cleanroom workstations. These workstations must be manned by skilled engineers who know exactly how to fix an external hard drive.
Data Recovery Software to recover
lost or deleted data on Windows
If you’ve lost or deleted any crucial files or folders from your PC, hard disk drive, or USB drive and need to recover it instantly, try our recommended data recovery tool.
Retrieve deleted or lost documents, videos, email files, photos, and more
Restore data from PCs, laptops, HDDs, SSDs, USB drives, etc.
Recover data lost due to deletion, formatting, or corruption
How to Fix an External Hard Drive… The Gillware Way
First, our engineers take a close look at the failed external hard drive and document its symptoms. This way, we can figure out what kind of work needs to go into fixing the drive. If need be, our engineers open up the drive at one of our clean room workstations and inspect its innards. This inspection helps our engineers come up with a firm price quote for our data recovery services. This is all part of our free data recovery evaluation services.
Once the customer approves the price quote, we start making the necessary repairs to their external hard drive. Using our fault-tolerant, write-protected hard drive imaging tools, which allow us to control the drive’s performance and target the user’s most critical data, we begin pulling data off of the drive. Sometimes a hard drive will need multiple repairs before we can successfully recover the client’s data.
We work with our clients to set clear goals for all of our data recovery cases. As part of our financially risk-free pricing model, we only charge for cases where we successfully meet these goals. After successfully recovering their data, we send the customer their recovered data on a new hard drive secured by a password.
