The symptom · nothing shows up
Drives come here from all across Plymouth, Devon and Cornwall with one line attached: the machine cannot see it. That line describes a circuit, and tells you nothing about the files. Take three questions in turn. Is it in the BIOS? Does Disk Management list it? Will Explorer open it? Wherever it first drops out is the part that has broken — the electronics, the firmware, or the volume.
You will be talking to an engineer
0800 6890668
| What happens | What that points to | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Disk Management shows Unknown, Not Initialized | It answers, but carries no valid signature and nothing survives of the partition table | Answer no to that box |
| The message whose last words are “…before Logical Disk Manager can access it” | Agree and an empty partition map takes the place of everything | Decline it, then unplug |
| Disk Management reports No Media | Only the controller answers; the storage sitting behind it is out of reach. That is a hardware matter, not a logical one. | Keep it disconnected |
| The BIOS has no entry | A burnt board, a protection diode shorted out, or a service area that will not load — electronics or firmware | Repair at component level |
| A 1TB disk listed as 8MB by the BIOS | Firmware or translator damage, which makes the reported size meaningless | Firmware tools are needed, not software |
| Power goes in, nothing happens | The electronics are burnt out and the TVS diode has shorted | Usually readable |
Whatever arrives is booked in under a case number on the day it reaches the bench. An engineer then works out the actual fault, and that part is free. You get a plain answer on what can come off the drive and what cannot, followed by one price in writing. Nothing further happens until you have read it and agreed.
Nothing is dismantled and nothing is left running. A short while at the BIOS, a look at Disk Management, then Explorer, and the job resolves into one of three: repair the electronics, rebuild a service area, or mend the file system on a copy.
The shorted diode is removed and replaced. Where a board cannot be rescued, a donor stands in and the original ROM chip is transferred onto it, since the adaptive values stored there were taken off your own platters and fit no other disk.
The moment the drive answers, a sector-by-sector image is taken. All the work after that is done on the image, and your own drive is set on a shelf and left.
Thinking it over costs you nothing. Everything the drive gave up is listed for you before any invoice exists, and the bill only follows your go-ahead. Files travel back on media bought in for your job, with return carriage paid at this end, and the case stays on the bench until you confirm they open on your own computer.
The point worth keeping: nearly every drive that arrives here invisible to its computer has a fault in electronics or firmware. Those are the parts that announce the disk to the machine, and they are not the parts holding what you saved. A drive that refuses to appear is telling you about its own hardware and nothing more.
A power cut overnight, and by morning the desktop was showing a single disk in place of two. The WD would not turn, with no BIOS entry for it at all. Its board had gone at the TVS diode. Its ROM was fitted to a donor PCB, and a whole image came off two days after the parcel reached us.
Generally yes. The board is repaired or exchanged, and whatever finished it seldom travels beyond the electronics to reach platters or flash. A drive that is completely dead is among the more predictable faults on this bench.
No, never. That box writes an empty partition map over the map recording where your files are. Answer no, disconnect the drive, and let an engineer look at it before anything else touches it.
It does not. A disk the BIOS cannot find has lost its way of announcing itself, not its contents. The break sits in the electronics, or in the code that lives in the service area — and your files are in neither.
Very probably. A protection diode absorbs the spike; it is put there to short out and fail first, before anything further in can. What you have lost is electronics. What you saved to the disk is unaffected.
The diagnosis is free, and it comes back as a list: which files read, which do not, and what getting them off would take. Until then, leave the drive unplugged.