Data Recovery

We offer an advanced data recovery service for hard drives, USB memory drives, Apple Time Capsules and NAS devices, including:

  • USB memory stick recovery (Transcend, Kingston, Adata, etc)

  • External hard drive data recovery (Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, etc)

  • Laptop hard drive data recovery (Seagate, HGST, Western Digital, etc)

  • Desktop hard drive data recovery (Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, etc)

  • MacBook hard drive data recovery

  • MacBook Air data recovery

  • NAS Recovery (Iomega, Lenovo, G-Technology, ReadyNAS)

  • Apple Time Capsule data recovery

  • Camera Card (CF, SD, xD) data recovery

We also recover data from Windows, Apple and Linux Ffile Ssystems, including:

    • HFS (Apple)

    • NTFS (Windows)

    • FAT and exFAT

    • ZFS, EXT 3, EXT 4 and XFS

Troubleshooting a defective hard disk drive

My hard drive is making a clicking noise – usually a sign of drive head failure.

My hard drive is totally dead when connected to a PC – this can be indicative of a failed PCB or corrupted firmware.

My hard drive spins up and then spins down – this is possibly a result of faulty heads or defective firmware.

When connected to a PC, I get the message, “You need to format the disk in drive E: before you can use it.” This is usually a sign of severe bad sectors or bad heads.

Data Recovery

When I connect my Western Digital external hard drive to my computer, I receive the message: “You need to format the disk in drive I: before you can use it. Do you want to format it?” Can the data be recovered?

This is normally indicative of a corrupt partition table on your hard drive. A corrupt partition table can be caused by extensive bad sectors and sometimes bad heads. Please contact us on 01-685 4838 (Dublin) and we can help you with this problem.

Can I get my hard drive repaired?

Hard drives have no serviceable parts inside them and so cannot be repaired for normal use. However, component-level repair is often performed for data recovery purposes to get the drive temporarily operational again.

I have accidentally deleted files off my computer ­– will I be able to retrieve them?

When you delete a file, you are not actually deleting it. What you are actually doing is deleting its Master File Table entry. So while the index of the file gets deleted, the actual file will still be on your hard drive. The file only gets deleted when you overwrite the file with another one. For example, if you had photographs on your hard drive, which you deleted three months ago, and you have since added additional photographs to your drive, your old photos will probably have been overwritten. If on the other hand, you have deleted photographs from your drive and added very few new files to your computer in the meantime, the probability of a successful data recovery is much higher.

I’ve spilled water on my Mac / laptop and need to retrieve the data. What should I do?

In most cases, your data should be recoverable after you have spilt liquid, such as tea, coffee, beer or water, onto your laptop. However, in certain cases, the liquid will permeate to the printed circuit board of your hard drive and cause it to short out or cause serious damage. It is important to remember that this damage can sometimes manifest itself several weeks after the spillage occurred.

The corrosive effect of liquids on laptops:

Liquid spillage on Laptop Liquid seeps into case Liquid gets into contact with motherboard / logic-board Corrosion of components begins Weeks later, the laptop fails to turn on due to electronic damage.

How much does data recovery cost?

There is a wide cost spectrum which, on average, can be anywhere from €50 to hundreds of Euro. It all depends on the type of data recovery that is needed, which could be a logical repair of your file system or, at other times, the replacement of the drive heads.