Free diagnoser
What is your drive actually doing?
Pick the device and the symptom. You get the likely cause, how recoverable that kind of failure tends to be and what changes it, and the price band it falls into. Where you can fix it yourself for nothing, it says so and tells you how. No email address, no wait.
What this tool will not do
It will not give you a recovery probability for your drive. Nobody can know that before the media has been imaged and read, and a percentage quoted over the internet by a company that has not seen your device is a sales figure rather than an engineering one. What you get here is the band a class of failure falls into and the specific factors that move your case up or down within it.
It also will not tell you that you need us when you don’t. Several of the situations in here are genuinely recoverable at home with free, open-source software, and those results say so plainly and link you to the tools rather than to our contact form. A drive that clicks is a different matter, and the tool is equally direct about that.
Every symptom, by device
73 pages, one for each combination that can physically happen. An SSD has no moving parts, so there is no page telling you what its clicking means.
Clickingpower it off
Beepingpower it off
Grinding or scrapingpower it off
Not spinning uppower it offoften DIY
Not showing upoften DIY
Detected but unreadableoften DIY
- External hard drive shows up but won't open
- Desktop hard drive shows up but won't open
- Laptop shows up but won't open
- SSD shows up but won't open
- USB stick shows up but won't open
- Memory card shows up but won't open
- Phone shows up but won't open
- NAS shows up but won't open
- CCTV recorder shows up but won't open
Dropped or knockedpower it off
Water or liquid damagepower it offoften DIY
Formatted by mistakeoften DIY
Files deletedoften DIY
RAID or NAS degradedpower it offoften DIY
Devices covered: external hard drive, desktop hard drive, laptop, SSD, USB stick, memory card, phone, NAS, CCTV recorder.
When you have the answer
An assessment is free and you get it in writing: what we found, which band it falls in, and a fixed quote that does not move afterwards. If the job needs a cleanroom we will tell you that early and refer it on at no charge rather than opening a drive we shouldn’t.