Does your donor drive match?
A donor drive is a working hard drive that we take parts from to repair yours. When a drive clicks, won’t spin or has a burnt circuit board, the data can often be recovered by fitting replacement heads, a replacement PCB or, in rare cases, moving the platters into a donor’s chassis.
Why the parts must match exactly
Read/write heads are calibrated to the platters and firmware of one specific model, family and firmware revision. A donor that only looks the same can fail to read anything, or scratch the platters and destroy the data. Use the checker to compare your drive’s label with a possible donor.
Please don’t try a transplant yourself. Opening a hard drive outside a clean room lets dust onto the platters, and a single particle can cause a head crash that makes the data unrecoverable. A matching donor is only part of the job: head swaps also need the right tools, adaptive data and firmware work. If the drive holds data you need, ask one of our engineers before you open it or buy parts.
Talk to an engineer
The evaluation is free, and you get a fixed price before any recovery work starts. Courier collection from anywhere in the UK, or drop off at our London lab.