Manchester Data Recovery Enquiries

In this post I help two people with hard drive problems from Manchester...

Broken hard drive port

Enquiry: I have a Hitachi external drive that the data exchange(usb lead) part attached to the small circuit board has broken. I have not got a model number on it but the board itself has a 15 digit number on it i could seed some pictures and sizes if it is possible to replace. I live in Manchester and run a small finance / mortgage business that offers mortgage brokering services to people throughout Manchester.

Reply: This is a very common problem on these type of hard drives. It seems that in design, the decision was made to integrate the port into the circuit board, but unfortunately this created a very flimsy connection which easily breaks. Rather than solder the connection back onto the circuit board, we instead fit a similar board and then reprogram it in order to access your data. This is then read to anther device that doesn't use this type of architecture.

Partition problems on hard drive

Enquiry: I have an external hard drive which has a partition, so should work for MAC and PC – And it did, whilst I was at university I was able to use with both. Now I have come to try and retrieve things off it it is not showing up on either! I have looked at every article and been into manage devices etc and still cannot access it. It is a Seagate 1TB drive. Please can you advise me? By the way, I live just outside Stretford and actually work in the city centre. I am close to Manchester and wonder if you have a local London data recovery office that I could take my hard drive into?

Reply: Partition problems can be difficult to solve the longer they go on. Initially they are usually caused by a simply read/write interruption to the hard drive data flow. The problems come if the computer's software try to sort the problems out automatically. The software is not able to do this which just exacerbates the problem.

As both of you are close to Manchester may I recommend that you call me direct - use the contact form to supply your numbers and I'll be in touch.