COMMON ERRORS
Black/Blue screen with a flashing cursor? No Boot device available?
No you haven't just rebooted jurassic park. Learn more.
You need to format the disk in drive before you can use it.
Do you want to format? No. Of course you don't.
You can hear clicking or something moving at least?
You sense vibration but nothing is happening?
Mechanical Hard drives have lots of moving parts, let us assess if they are working how they should.
Location is not available. Drive not accessible? Access Denied.
It's nice of Windows to provide you with an OK button.
Get in touch, we might be able to help you out.
Probably needs some Geek love.
Got an Error? Check the most common hard drive failure errors here.
This can simply mean the hard drive is absolutely fine but the operating system or BIOS system configuration has been altered preventing it booting. If you had Windows Updates for example this would class as an alteration to the Operating system.
Theres a few troubleshooting tasks you can do here, but it depends how technical you are.
Unfortunately there is no universal instruction how to get into your bios, so Google your computer's make and model number asking how to get into the BIOS. This is typically pressing the F1, F2 or Del Key when booting, but it depends on the computer.
The BIOS typically is a menu based system and you are looking for the options in relation to Boot order.
If your hard drive is still selectable in this menu, there is hope. This recovery would likely be very easy by someone slightly techy. You would need another computer and something like a USB to SATA cable. Simply remove the hard drive from your computer, plug the SATA side of the cable into the hard drive and plug the USB into a working computer.
It should map to your computer like a USB Hard Drive/USB Stick. Simply copy the files across safely to the working computer. You will likely need to repair your operating system on that hard drive and from our experience its generally easier to format and start again because when Windows goes wrong once, it's likely going to go wrong again.
If you went to an IT repair shop, I would expect to pay not much more than £20-30 to recover the data.
Now if your hard drive is not visible by the BIOS in the boot order and if you did take it out and plug it in with a USB to SATA cable and it didn't map on the PC, we might have a failed hard drive.
Unless you dropped it or spilt something over it, it's likely a logical recovery and we would expect you to pay no more than £65 for this recovery.
Let's rule out hardware first.
- Check alternative USB Ports
Seems obvious, but sometimes the USB port has simply failed or there is a power problem.
Devices draw power from USB ports and sometimes low powered devices work, but devices that require a bit more power do not. You might simply have a failing port. Be sure to remove all other non essential USB devices from your PC/Laptop before you try alternative ports however as sometimes other USB devices can prevent other USB ports working at full power.
If it is a laptop, plug the cable in if it is running on battery. Again if the power draw is a problem, it might be a battery fault.
- Lets try device manager
Press the windows key (logo) and R at the same time. This brings up "Run".
Type devmgmt.msc and press enter.
Do you see any yellow triangles, question marks or red x's anywhere? If you do, it could simply be that Windows has a driver fault.
Have you tried the USB device on another computer? Try that.
- Lets try disk manager
Press the windows key (logo) and R at the same time. This brings up "Run".
Type diskmgmt.msc and press enter.
At the bottom you'll see Disk 0 and perhaps others, named Disk 1, Disk 2 etc. There is a scroll down on this lower part of the menu. You are looking for the word "removable" underneath the disk number. Now if you have CD/DVD/Blueray drive, one of those in that list will be that. Anything else is an external device, perhaps your USB Device.
Now if you can recognise which disk is the disk you are having problems with we need to determine it's health. If it's black (or has any indication of errors like red X's) and says unallocated, not initialised or disk unknown. Stop.
Other errors we shout Stop at might include:
Virtual Disk Manager
"The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error".
"The request is not supported"
"Access is denied"
"The request failed due to a fatal device hardware error"
If any of the above look familiar, you need technical hands. It doesn't mean it will be expensive, just that you likely need specialist software to help you out.
There are loads out there, but we can assess it for you for free and give you some options. If it simply means us using our software and we are staring at progress bars, this is a fairly inexpensive fix.
It’s a common problem – power is applied to a hard drive but.. nothing happens.
When you put your ear to the hard drive you can't even hear it trying to start up and naturally you cannot get data off it.
A Beeping noise might also be heard from the computer, like a USB has just failed. While you may not be able to access your data right now, you likely still have the ability to retrieve the data.
So the questions are:
- Have you dropped it?
- Has there been any power cuts/spikes?
- Is the hard drive old?
If any of the above are true... it is likely the cause. In which case you need us to assess it for a data recovery and extraction, which can be pricey if we need to take it apart. If none of the above are true, then it might simply be a power problem.
We can asses that to of course, or if you want to try it at home, you need a specific cable to rule this out. Get in touch and we can point you in the right direction.
If your cable and our instructions still do not work, we need to have a look at it and assess it from our end.
We'll provide a no obligation quote and it is up to you if you think it's worth the cost.
Sounds like the file system has broken or the hard drive has indeed failed in some manner.
This can mean a multitude of things and unfortunately if you have Googled the error you have probably read about a million articles on how you should download this "brand new, amazing recovery software" which in truth is just a re-badged version of the other "amazing recovery software" on the other website.
A lot of the domestic recovery software packages are the same, as in identical. The reason being is that programmers that make this software offer a re-brand/white label program for companies or individuals that want to put their logo on the same software and profit from it.
Do not fall for it. Software that white labels itself demonstrates a total lack of care for the end user and is in it for money only.
Now this type of error has too many questions associated with it and is really best in the hands of data recovery professionals. However, this is when the data recovery market takes advantage of the consumer.
We offer a free (excluding p+p) data assessment and we video the assessment for transparency.
We will put it against our internal tools which will include some software you might see advertised online but also software you probably have not heard of. We'll give you an honest situation report. If you rather go elsewhere, that is absolutely fine to and we will provide a list of some recommended companies, but we will also provide a list of those we urge you not to consider.
This market is not very well regulated in our opinion and we have seen prices skyrocket for customers. The last thing we want is for your business to go into the pocket of Data cowboys so they can continue flooding the top of google with advertisements. It makes honest companies fall down the list and this is a shame as there are some damn good professionals out there that will go above and beyond.