Often fixable yourself
Laptop not showing up
A laptop in this state is very often something you can resolve yourself, at no cost, and this page tells you how before it tells you anything about us. Where that doesn't work, the rest explains what the fault usually is and what recovery involves.
What this usually turns out to be
2.5-inch drives are built to survive being carried, which means they are also the ones most often dropped while running.
Cable, port or enclosure faultbetter news
The single commonest cause, and entirely benign. The device behind the failed connection is untouched.
Partition table or boot sector damagebetter news
The drive is healthy and the files are all present, but the index that points to them is corrupt, so the operating system sees unallocated space.
Filesystem the operating system doesn't recognisebetter news
A drive formatted on a Mac, a Linux box, or a NAS will often appear unreadable or empty on Windows while being perfectly intact.
Controller or translation-layer failure
On flash media, the controller that maps files onto the memory has failed. The memory is intact but nothing can reach it without specialist work.
Degrading or failing media
The device is present but cannot complete the reads needed to identify itself. This is the case where time and power do matter.
Try this before you pay anyone
Work through these before assuming the worst. Most cases end here
- Change the cable first. USB cables fail far more often than drives do, and a charge-only cable carries no data at all.
- Try every port, then a different computer. A drive that appears on another machine has a driver or port fault, not a data fault.
- Check whether the operating system can see the device even though the files aren't visible: Disk Management on Windows, Disk Utility on macOS, `lsblk` on Linux. A device listed there with no drive letter or mount point is intact and simply not mounted.
- If it is listed but shows as RAW or unallocated, stop and read the next line carefully.
If Windows offers to initialise the disk, or macOS offers to repair or erase it, say no every time. Those actions write to the very structures that describe where your files are. A drive showing as RAW usually still has everything on it, and that stays true only for as long as nothing writes to it.
How recoverable this is
The most optimistic group on this page taken as a whole. A large share are connection or filesystem faults where the data was never in danger, and a good number of those the reader resolves themselves in ten minutes at no cost. The cases that are genuinely media or controller failures are a different job, and the checks below separate them without risk.
What moves it, for your device specifically:
- Whether the device is detected at any level: BIOS, Disk Management, or not at all
- Whether anything has already written to it, including an initialise or a repair
- Whether the underlying media is healthy or degrading
We will not give you a percentage for your device, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Nobody can know what is recoverable until the media has been imaged and read. What is above describes this class of failure; your drive gets its own answer after an assessment, in writing, at no cost.
What it costs
from $249
Deleted, formatted or corrupt (drive healthy)
Files deleted, a drive reformatted, a partition lost, a filesystem that won't mount. The media itself is fine; the map to the data isn't.
What moves a job within its band: capacity, how much of the media is unstable, whether the filesystem is encrypted, and how much of the drive has to be read before the files you need are reachable. You get one fixed figure after the assessment and it does not move afterwards. If we can’t recover what matters to you, there is no recovery fee.
Not quite your situation?
Pick the device and what it is doing, and this gives you the same answer for that combination instead.