External hard drive recovery for portable and desktop USB drives that are dropped, clicking, undetected, corrupted or accidentally formatted. Brisbane laboratory and Australia-wide intake.
Stop using the drive as soon as important files disappear or its behaviour changes. Repeated power cycles, repair utilities and reformatting can overwrite recoverable data or worsen physical damage.
Disconnect the drive and keep its original enclosure, cable and power adapter together. Do not initialise it, run CHKDSK, Disk Utility First Aid or recovery software, and do not open the sealed hard drive mechanism.
If the drive is clicking or has been dropped, leave it powered off. Mechanical symptoms need a controlled assessment before any attempt to read the platters.
An external enclosure may contain an ordinary hard disk, but some models integrate the USB connection or encryption with the drive electronics. Assessment must preserve those dependencies. For related information, see hard drive data recovery and our guidance for a clicking hard drive.
A known-good cable and correct power supply may be checked once if the drive has no physical-damage symptoms. Do not keep testing a clicking, dropped, burnt or liquid-affected drive.
Potentially. Cancel the format prompt and disconnect the drive. The message may indicate partition, file-system, connection or media damage rather than an empty drive.
Dropped drives can suffer damaged heads, seized components or surface damage. Recovery prospects depend on the condition of the media, so avoid further power-on attempts.
Yes, where available. They can help identify power, bridge-board or hardware-encryption dependencies and allow the original setup to be assessed.
Yes. Australia-wide intake is available. Pack the powered-off drive securely and include its cable and power adapter when relevant.
Tell us what happened, what the drive now does and which files matter most. Keep the device powered off while we help you choose the safest next step.