Portable drives hold more irreplaceable data per household than any other device we see - the photo archive, the business backup, the video projects too big for the laptop. They are also the most frequently dropped, knocked, unplugged and mistreated storage there is. If your external drive is clicking, beeping, unrecognised or silent, the difference between recoverable and gone is usually decided in the next few power-ons. Unplug it and talk to us first.
Most external drives are two products in one case: the drive itself, and a small bridge board that converts the drive's connection to USB and provides the port, the light and sometimes the power regulation. They fail independently - and telling one failure from the other is the first job of assessment. (On some newer portables the USB electronics are built onto the drive's own circuit board rather than a separate one - the same triage applies, just at board level.)
The drive inside is often perfectly healthy: the light won't come on, the port is loose or damaged, the drive isn't detected, or it disconnects at a touch of the cable. These can be contained recoveries - the data is intact and the electronics around it need work.
You get the classic drive symptoms through a USB cable: clicking, beeping, not spinning, painfully slow access. Mechanical failures in a portable drive are the full hard drive discipline - imaging on specialist hardware, donor parts for failed mechanics.
The obvious DIY move - shuck the drive and plug it in directly - is exactly the move that must not be made on many common externals. And if the drive itself is failing mechanically, connecting it any which way just spends more of its remaining life outside a lab.
Clicking, beeping and grinding through a USB cable mean exactly what they mean in any drive - and the same lab methods apply.
Find your symptom - and the one move that protects your data.
Triage before power. A portable drive arriving at the lab is assessed before it is trusted with power: what's in the case, what failed - bridge or drive - and what the safest first move is. A dropped mechanical drive is never casually spun up to "see what it does"; that first spin happens under controlled conditions where a problem can be caught immediately.
Bridge and electronics faults handled at board level. Failed USB bridges, damaged ports and power faults are electronics work: repairing or working around the failed board while respecting any hardware encryption tied to it.
Mechanical failures get the full hard drive discipline. Imaging on dedicated hardware built for failing drives - reading gently, mapping errors, backing off weak areas - and donor parts fitted in controlled lab conditions where heads or motors have failed. Never a repair-and-return: one complete, careful read of your data is the goal.
Recovery from the image, verified, returned. File systems rebuilt, files extracted and checked, data returned on a new drive or by secure transfer. You approve a firm quote before recovery starts - assessment is from $230, and if you don't go ahead, the assessment fee is all you've spent.
WD My Passport and Elements, Seagate Backup Plus and Expansion, Toshiba Canvio, LaCie, Samsung, Transcend, Verbatim, ADATA - plus every drive that started life internal and was put in a third-party enclosure.
Desktop-style externals with their own power supplies included: their extra failure mode is the power adapter and the surge it can pass on, so if yours died alongside its adapter, say so.
Old externals with FireWire or early USB, and drives out of long-retired enclosures: all readable with the right equipment, all normal work for the lab.
Call, WhatsApp or book online. Tell us the brand and model, what happened - especially any drops - and what the drive does now.
Drop it at our Auckland lab or courier it overnight from anywhere in NZ. Pack it padded in a rigid box; include the cable, and the power adapter if it has one.
We diagnose what has actually failed and quote the recovery. Assessment from $230. No work proceeds without your approval.
Approved recoveries are completed in our lab and your data is returned on a new drive or by secure transfer.
The questions we answer every week about external and portable drives.
It depends on what failed. A bridge board fault with a healthy drive inside sits at one end of the range; a mechanical recovery needing donor parts after a drop sits at the other. Assessment starts from $230, and you then get a firm quote for your specific drive before deciding anything. No recovery work starts without your approval.
Unplug it and leave it unplugged - especially if it was running when it fell. Don't plug it in to check, don't tap it, don't open it. If it took a real fall while running, the heads may be damaged, and the next spin-up can harm the platter surface where your data lives. Note down how it fell and get it assessed.
Usually that the platters can't spin: a seized motor, or heads stuck to the platter surface - common after drops and knocks. It is a mechanical failure, it will not resolve with retries, and each attempt risks making it worse. Unplug it and have it assessed; beeping externals are among the most common jobs in the lab.
No - click cancel. That prompt means the hardware is visible but the file system isn't readable: corruption from an unsafe unplug, a failing drive, or - after an enclosure swap on certain models - hardware encryption doing its job. The data is typically still there, and formatting on top makes recovery harder.
Please don't. On many popular externals - including many WD My Passport models - the case's board encrypts everything on the drive, even with no password set, so the bare drive reads as gibberish in any other enclosure. And if the drive is failing mechanically, running it outside the lab spends the life it has left. Bring the whole unit in, as-is.
Rarely gone - usually just unreachable, which is a different thing. Sudden disappearance is typically the bridge board, the drive's electronics, or a drive that has stopped responding mid-failure. Data is rarely destroyed by whatever caused the vanishing; the risk comes from the retries and experiments afterwards.
Usually, if the drive stops being used promptly. On mechanical externals, deleted and quick-formatted data remains on the platters until overwritten, and there's no background clean-up erasing it. Put the drive aside now. If new data has been written since, recovery becomes partial - another reason to stop immediately.
Same symptom, different discipline. Portable SSDs fail electronically - controller or firmware, usually without warning - rather than mechanically, and recovery goes through chip and controller-level methods rather than donor mechanics. The immediate advice is identical: stop plugging it in, and have it assessed.
Send them if you can, especially the power adapter on desktop-style externals. Faulty adapters cause failures and can damage a replacement drive too, so testing yours tells us something - and if the fault turns out to be just the adapter or cable, that's the cheapest good news you'll ever get from a lab.
It depends on the fault and the queue. Bridge-board and electronics work runs faster than a mechanical recovery needing donor parts, and a drive with weak sectors must be imaged at the pace that protects the data. You'll get a realistic timeframe with your quote; if there's a genuine deadline, tell us and we'll be straight about what's possible.
If your portable drive is clicking, beeping, invisible or fresh off the floor, the next power-on is the most expensive button-press in the house. Unplug it, leave it, and let a lab that sees these failures every week tell you exactly where you stand - firm diagnosis, firm quote, your decision.