MKDR / Specialist jobs / Seagate data recovery

Specialist · Seagate recovery

A click, then silence. The platters still hold it.

Seagate portables — Expansion, Backup Plus, One Touch — are the drives Milton Keynes posts us most, and they go in a handful of ways: heads that clatter and stop, a media cache that stalls partway through a copy, firmware that hangs and never wakes. Barracuda internals end the same way inside desktops. Old 7200.11 units still turn up locked solid. All bench work, none of it quick.

No data back, no fee — most jobs Free diagnosis, one fixed quote Send it by post from anywhere in Buckinghamshire

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0800 6890668

What those symptoms actually mean.

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The problem	What's behind it	First move
An Expansion drive clicks, then stops	The heads have failed. Nothing on the platters has changed — they simply cannot be read now	Power off; clicks cost data
A One Touch drops out mid-copy	The media cache is flushing and the drive stalls — normal on SMR, until it isn't	Stop the copy; let a bench image it
A Backup Plus not seen since it was knocked	Heads shifted or stuck on the ramp — clean-air work, not a software job	Don't shake it, don't freeze it
A Barracuda slowing down, with folders hanging	Weak sectors and endless retries — shingled models worst of all	Stop working it and get an image taken while it reads
An old 7200.11 desktop drive gone silent	The BSY lockup those units are famous for — firmware, not the disk	A terminal fix, not a format
Windows offers to format a drive that was full	The file system took the damage, not the platters underneath it	Refuse it, then send the drive in

Sending it by post: send it in on a tracked, insured service to our secure intake lab — the return postage is ours — or ring first and an engineer will talk you through packing it. Every posting step is set out on the enquiry page.

The Seagate line-up, and how each one goes.

ExpansionThe plain black portable sold by the million. Cheap, handy, and usually the only copy of something that matters. Heads are what fail here: a click on power-up, then nothing. The platters are fine, so the work is a matched donor stack and a slow, careful image after it.

Backup Plus, One TouchThe same drive in newer clothes. Shingled inside, which is why they stall partway through a long copy while the media cache catches up. Where a One Touch had a password set on it, we will need that from you.

Barracuda internalsThe 3.5in drives inside desktops and small servers. Larger Barracudas are shingled as well, which shows up as a machine getting slower for months before the drive finally stops. Come to us early and there is more of it left to save.

The old 7200.11Nearly twenty years on, these still arrive: a desktop drive that spins up, sounds busy and never appears anywhere. The firmware has jammed. With a serial connection and the right commands it comes back, usually with the lot still on board.

How the recovery runs, stage by stage.

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Logged in, checked at no charge Free

Every item gets its own case number on the day it lands here. An engineer traces the fault, gives you a plain assessment of what is realistically recoverable, and puts one fixed price in writing. The diagnosis is free, you are under no obligation, and chargeable work starts only when you say go.

No charge to diagnoseOne written quote, fixedNo commitment

Heard first, powered second

A drive that clicks is told to stop clicking. Power goes on at the bench only, under control, while we work out whether heads, firmware or surface is at fault. Guessing at that stage costs reads.

Heads, firmware or surface?Named before any work

Heads changed, or firmware freed

Head work happens in clean air with a donor matched to family and batch: the stack lifted off the ramp, swapped, and reloaded. On a locked 7200.11 the answer is a serial terminal instead — no screwdriver required.

Donor parts sourcedClean-air work on the heads

Imaged head by head, slowly

Shingled drives read in bursts and sulks, so the copy is built head by head and zone by zone, weakest left till last. Days rather than hours is normal, and each good pass is banked before we ask again.

Every readable sector copiedFolders back as you knew them

Played back, checked, handed back

You get the full list of recovered files first, and nothing is charged until you approve it. Data goes back on fresh media, return postage paid, and the job stays open on our side until you confirm every file opens at your end.

You sign off the file listCopied onto unused mediaReturn post is paid by us

What the imager checks first

Clicking is not a software problem — a clattering Expansion has lost its heads, and every fresh power-up drags them across the platters once more. Nothing you install will help. Clean air and a matched donor will.
Shingled portables image slowly — overlapping tracks and a stalling media cache mean a 4TB Backup Plus can take days to copy off. There is no fast version of this job, only a careful one.
USB sits on the drive's own board — most 2.5in portables have no SATA plug to fall back on, so a dead board gets repaired rather than swapped.
SeaTools reports, it does not rescue — its short and long tests confirm a drive is failing, which you already suspect, while spending reads you may want later. On a clicking drive, leave them alone.

Where we have to be straight with you: head jobs do not always work. A matched donor, clean air and a steady hand get most drives reading again, but a stack that has already scoured the surface may give up only part of what was there. Imaging then runs for days, and you see the file list before any fee is due.

Lately in the casebook.

MK · MKD-2026-4834CONFIRMED ✓

The Backup Plus that clicked once and stopped dead

It went over on its cable and never mounted again — one tick on power-up, then nothing at all. The heads had failed. A donor from the same family and batch was found, the stack was changed in clean air, and the drive read again on the bench. Being a shingled 4TB portable it read in fits: six days of short passes, weakest zones last, the copy banked after every one. Almost all of it came home, the family photos among it.

98% recoveredDonor heads fitted

While it is still in your hands.

Worth doing

Switch it off and leave it
Tell us what you heard — clicks, beeps or silence
Send the whole portable, its cable and its adapter
Give us the model number: ST plus the digits on the label

Best avoided

Freezer tricks and gentle taps
Powering it up over and over to test it
Running SeaTools on a drive that clicks
Opening the case to look at the heads

The questions we get asked most.

My Barracuda dropped out of the BIOS in use — is the data lost?

Very rarely. It's the classic Seagate firmware lockup, the same BSY fault the old 7200.11 units are known for: the firmware stalls, the drive stops answering the host, and the BIOS shows either nothing or a 0MB disk. The platters are untouched — your files are still on the disk behind that silence. No program running on your PC can scan a drive it cannot see; a serial terminal at the bench can. Leave it powered off and book it in.

Is a manufacturer's firmware updater safe on a failing drive?

No. A firmware update tells the drive to overwrite the exact code that is misbehaving in the first place. On a drive that is already failing, a flash that halts can take it beyond the point where service mode still responds, and the translator that maps your data disappears with it. A recoverable fault becomes a far harder one. Switch the drive off and send it exactly as it stands.

A One Touch SSD with hardware encryption — can you get the data?

With the password, yes. Encryption happens inside the bridge hardware itself, so once that failed component is fixed, or the flash read directly, the password opens everything exactly as before. Without it, no — the AES is genuine, nobody here can break it, and no honest lab pretends otherwise. Most One Touch failures come down to the USB port or the bridge, not the flash itself, so with a password in hand the odds are usually decent.

Files deleted off a working SSD — is there a way back?

Only if you move fast, and not always then. A working SSD runs TRIM quietly in the background, wiping deleted blocks permanently, often inside a few minutes. Pull the power as soon as you spot the problem and there may be something left; keep using the drive and there won't be. Diagnosis will tell you straight which of those two you're facing, and it costs you nothing.

Other jobs from the casebook.

Externals & portable disks → Drive not seen → Clicks & beeps → Devices we handle →

Leave it switched off until it reaches us.

Switch a failing device on again and you lose a little more. Open a case before you do — the diagnosis is free, whatever it finds.

0800 6890668

Start a free diagnosis How to send it in

Kit and media we work with

Common failures

Investigations & evidence

The practical side