How to Recover Data From an External Hard Drive

Portable external hard drives can fail and break down just like any other hard drive. In fact, due to their portability, they’re even more susceptible to being damaged by physical trauma, such as being dropped, than the drive inside your computer. A common problem is an external hard drive not responding. When these external hard drives break down, it’s not uncommon to hear them making clicking or beeping noises. When you hear these noises, it’s a sure sign there’s something wrong “under the hood”. Only highly-trained hard drive repair specialists like the staff at Gillware know how to recover data from an external hard drive safely and reliably.

Many external drives have perfectly normal hard drives inside them. However, the drives have a SATA-USB bridging dongle connected to them. When the drive is completely unresponsive, sometimes the dongle, not the hard drive, is responsible. In these cases, you can just crack open the casing, unplug the hard drive, and recover your data! However, some external drives, like the WD My Book, have encryption data on the dongle. Data recovery requires additional measures to get around when the dongle fails.

When your external hard drive is clicking, beeping, or making other unusual noises, though, few people know how to recover data from an external hard drive. These hard drive repairs must be made in a contaminant-free cleanroom data recovery lab. DIY data recovery performed outside a professional lab can cause severe and permanent data loss. Professional data recovery labs like Gillware have plenty of skilled engineers who know exactly how to recover data from an external hard drive.

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How to Recover Data from an External Hard Drive… The Gillware Way

When you need data recovery from an external hard drive, you can count on Gillware to provide affordable, professional data recovery services. The specialists in our lab have thousands of hours apiece of work repairing failed hard drives and know exactly how to recover data from an external hard drive, safely and reliably.

As soon as your external hard drive enters our data recovery lab, our engineers begin the evaluation stage of our data recovery process. The goal of our free evaluations is to determine the drive’s cause of failure, assess its damage, and determine a firm price quote and probability of success. We send our price quote to you and work with you to lay out clear goals.

Once you approve the quote, we begin recovering your data. Whether your drive needs its read/write heads replaced, its circuit board swapped, or its disk platters burnished, our engineers can do the work safely inside our cleanroom lab. Using our powerful fault-tolerant data recovery tools, we salvage data from the drive. Severely damaged external hard drives may need multiple rounds of repairs. Some external drives, such as drives with hardware-level full-drive encryption, require more work than others.

Once we successfully meet your goals, we send the recovered data back to you on a new, encrypted hard drive. As part of our financially risk-free guarantee, we only charge for successful data recovery attempts.

There you have it—those are the basics of external hard drive file recovery. Like many things in life… if you want it done right, you should ask the professionals.

Will Ascenzo
Will Ascenzo

Will is the lead blogger, copywriter, and copy editor for Gillware Data Recovery and Digital Forensics, and a staunch advocate against the abuse of innocent semicolons.

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