External and portable USB hard drive repair and data recovery
We are recognised experts. Our engineers draw on more than 15 years of experience, proprietary tools and methods.
Your external hard drive is your everyday ally for backing up all kinds of files. But you’re not immune to data loss. Documents or photos can be accidentally deleted, and a damaged hard drive can become faulty. Whatever the reason, you need to recover data from a portable external USB hard drive. Chronodisk handles the repair and recovery of external and portable USB hard drives.
What is an external hard drive?
External (USB) or portable hard drives consist of an enclosure housing a standard drive with a USB interface adapter, or a drive with a built-in controller. These enclosures are therefore subject to all the usual drive-related issues. The hard drive can be desktop (mains-powered) or portable (bus-powered).
2 possible formats:
- 2.5-inch (6.35 cm) : these are the most common external hard drives, as they are powered solely via the USB cable. They are known as “Portable” drives.
- 3.5-inch (8.89 cm): these have their own power supply in addition to USB, and their storage capacity is generally larger than a 2.5-inch drive. They are known as “Desktop” drives.
This type of drive has a few weak points:
When portable external hard drives are dropped or take an impact, this systematically causes a mechanical fault, especially if the drive is running at the time. The device will emit a clicking sound the next time it is powered on. Repair and recovery of lost files and data from external hard drives with this kind of fault is possible once the exact fault has been identified and the device correctly repaired.
Portable hard drives also tend to overheat. This is caused by inadequate ventilation of the external enclosure. Some external hard drives have no ventilation at all. A small number of devices may include a fan inside the enclosure to combat heat build-up.
Whatever the nature of the fault, Chronodisk provides suitable solutions to recover deleted files.
Start a data recovery now
Request your free assessment and arrange a free collection of your media
What type of fault can affect an external hard drive?
Several situations can lead to repair and file recovery on a damaged media. Whether internal or external, a hard drive contains mechanical parts. These are highly sensitive to a number of factors: vibration, drops, flooding, temperature changes, and so on.
Faults on this type of media generally fall into three categories: logical faults, electronic faults and mechanical faults.
Logical faults
A logical fault is the least serious type of fault affecting an external hard drive. The storage system generally works normally, but you cannot access your data.
This fault is usually caused by software viruses, an accidental full format, malware, partitioning issues, accidental file deletion, and so on.
Electronic faults
With an electronic fault, the drive is inert and makes no noise at all. This fault is frequently caused by an abnormally high electrical voltage or by the failure of an electronic component.
Sound of a working hard drive:
Mechanical faults (cleanroom processing)
A mechanical fault on an internal hard drive occurs when the media is subjected to:
- impacts
- drops
- sharp temperature changes
- wear
- flooding or fire, etc.
Here are the sounds symptomatic of a mechanical fault:
Faulty heads
70% success rate
Sounds from most to least common
It shows up as clicking sounds (the read head arm moving back and forth) or beeping
Heads not responding
60% success rate
there is no head movement and the motor stops (Western Digital)
Scratched platter
30% success rate
This high-pitched whine usually indicates scratches on the drive’s platter(s), preventing the read/write heads from processing the stored data.
Jammed motor
90% success rate
A humming or clicking sound from your hard drive can indicate a jammed or damaged spindle motor.
Broken platter
0% success rate
The glass platter has shattered into pieces. In this case, all of the device’s mechanical functions are damaged.
External hard drive repair and data recovery: our 5-step process
When you hand over your device for repair and data recovery, we follow a five-step process:
- Receipt of your external hard drive: acknowledgement of receipt
- Diagnosis: we assess the damage and produce a diagnostic report to determine whether your data can be recovered, with a list of recoverable data.
- Data extraction.
- Copying the data onto a new hard drive.
- Return of the drive.
Why choose Chronodisk?
The hard drive is Chronodisk’s specialty. It’s the area where we have the most experience. Hard drives account for 80% of our activity, compared with 15% for SSD drives. Our technology and processes for repair and data recovery have been proven since 2003, and the consolidation of manufacturers (only three remain worldwide) makes our research and development work easier.
We hold the largest stock of spare parts in Paris (nearly 20,000 drives).
Our two cleanrooms and our full range of equipment allow us to handle a large volume of cases simultaneously. We can also handle urgent repair and data recovery cases.
We are recognised experts. Our technicians draw on more than 15 years of experience, proprietary tools and methods.
Start a data recovery now
Request your free assessment and arrange a free collection of your media
Expert insight: some technical challenges with hard drives
Impact while running:
A drive’s motor spins at 5,400, or even 7,200, revolutions per minute. The heads sit very close to the platters to increase information density. The slightest impact can cause dents or even scratches.
Scratches:
The slightest scratch on the drive can be fatal. The platters are made of aluminium or glass. The head flies at a height of 2 nanometres, and a scratch creates material spillover that is fatal to the read heads. Sometimes we can disable certain heads and read the unaffected surfaces.
Myth-busting tips:
Swapping the circuit board (you need to find the exact same board, and boards have been serialised since 2005, so this no longer works), opening the hard drive yourself and swapping the read head (without a cleanroom to keep out dust, it’s a bit of a gamble), putting it in the fridge overnight (a lovely urban legend — if it were that simple…)
Switching from USB to SATA:
Our tools are historically better suited to SATA, and low-level access is less effective over USB. So the engineer’s first task is to convert the USB drive to SATA. This means soldering wires onto the circuit board, and on the latest generations of boards this no longer works. We have to modify SATA boards to make them compatible.
Encryption:
Drives natively encrypt data. That’s great for confidentiality when a drive is recycled, but it makes repair and recovery much harder for us.
