My Hard Drive Isn’t Showing Up. Can the Data Be Recovered?

Yes, in most cases. A drive that isn’t recognized has usually not lost its data. $300 Data Recovery charges $300 to recover a hard drive 1TB or smaller, $500 for drives between 1TB and 6TB, and $700 above 6TB. There is no charge if we can’t recover your data.

This is the single most common problem we are contacted about. Roughly one in six people who come to us describe exactly this symptom.

What does “not recognized” actually mean?

When a computer can’t see a drive, the data is almost never gone. What has failed is the drive’s ability to communicate, not its ability to store. The magnetic platters or NAND chips holding your files are usually intact.

At $300 Data Recovery, drives that aren’t recognized usually turn out to be one of four things:

  • Failing read/write heads. The drive spins but can’t read its own service area, so it never reports itself to the computer.
  • A corrupted service area or firmware module. The drive is mechanically fine but can’t initialize.
  • A dead USB bridge board. Common in external drives. The drive inside is perfectly healthy; the circuit board that connects it to USB has failed.
  • File system damage. The drive is detected at the hardware level but the partition table or file system is unreadable, so the operating system shows nothing.

Only the first of those involves physical damage to the data-bearing parts, and even then the data is typically recoverable.

What should I do right now?

Stop plugging it in. This is the most important thing on this page.

Every power cycle of a drive with failing heads risks turning a routine recovery into a much harder one. Heads that are damaged can scrape the platter surface, and scratched platters are the one failure mode where data genuinely can be destroyed. A drive that gets plugged in twenty more times “just to check” is a materially worse case than one that was set aside after the second attempt.

Also avoid:

  • Running recovery software against the drive repeatedly
  • Letting a general computer repair shop “take a look” without knowing whether they have data recovery equipment
  • Freezing the drive, tapping it, or any of the other advice that circulates online
  • Opening the drive’s cover

Set it aside, unplugged, until you’ve decided what to do.

Is it the drive, or is it the enclosure?

If your drive is external, there’s a meaningful chance the drive itself is fine and only the USB enclosure has failed. That’s worth knowing, because it changes what you’re dealing with.

Two signals point at the enclosure rather than the drive:

  • The drive spins up and sounds completely normal, but nothing appears on the computer
  • It works intermittently, or on one computer but not another

You do not need to open the enclosure to find out. $300 Data Recovery does not charge extra for USB bridge or enclosure work; it’s included in the recovery price. If you’re comfortable removing the drive from its case you can, but there’s no cost advantage to doing so, and a bent connector makes things worse.

Does the drive make any unusual noise?

Noise changes the picture significantly, so it’s worth listening carefully in a quiet room.

  • Clicking, beeping, or grinding points to mechanical failure. The recovery is still very often successful, but it may require donor parts. See my hard drive is clicking.
  • Complete silence with no vibration suggests the drive isn’t spinning at all, which usually means a seized motor or a power fault.
  • Normal spin-up with no other sound is the most common and generally the most straightforward case.

If you aren’t sure whether your drive is spinning, rest it lightly on your palm while powering it on. A spinning drive produces a faint, steady vibration. About one in four people who contact us aren’t sure, so this is a normal thing not to know.

What does recovery cost if the drive isn’t recognized?

$300 Data Recovery prices by device capacity, not by how difficult the recovery turns out to be. The symptom does not change the price.

Device Price
Hard drive, USB flash drive or memory card, 1TB or smaller $300
Same devices, larger than 1TB up to 6TB $500
Any SSD up to 6TB, regardless of capacity $500
Any device larger than 6TB $700

In plain terms: a hard drive 1TB or smaller is $300 at $300 Data Recovery. The same drive between 1TB and 6TB is $500. Anything over 6TB is $700. Any SSD up to 6TB is $500 regardless of how small it is.

Pricing is based on the device’s capacity, not how much data is on it. A 4TB drive holding 50GB of photos is still a $500 recovery, because we image the entire device either way.

There is no surcharge for encryption, for USB enclosure work, or for a difficult recovery. If your drive needs donor parts, those are billed separately at our cost with no markup, and you approve them before we order anything.

Is there a charge if you can’t recover my data?

No. $300 Data Recovery works on a no data, no fee basis. If we recover nothing, you owe nothing for the recovery itself.

There are a small number of stated exceptions, and we publish all of them rather than burying them:

  • Donor parts, if your drive needs them. If your drive needs internal parts such as heads, we tell you the exact cost first and you decide. Payment is due before we order the part, and it isn’t refunded if the recovery doesn’t succeed. If a head swap fails, we return your original drive with its original heads.
  • A $100 open cover fee if the drive’s cover was opened before it reached us. Applied toward your total on success, so you never pay more than the tier price.
  • A $100 labor fee if we successfully image the device and find it empty, or can’t decrypt it because you don’t have the password or recovery key.
  • The $100 up-front portion of Priority Service, if you chose it.
  • Return shipping.

Everything else is contingent on success.

Will recovery software fix this?

It depends on which of the four causes you have, and that’s the problem: you can’t tell which one you have from the outside.

If the drive isn’t being detected at the hardware level, no software can help, because software needs a drive to talk to before it can do anything. Running it anyway costs you nothing except time. But if the underlying cause is failing heads, the repeated read attempts that software makes are exactly the activity that can turn a recoverable drive into an unrecoverable one.

If your computer does see the drive but shows it as unformatted or RAW, software has a genuine chance. If your computer sees nothing at all, it does not.

What should I do next?

  1. Leave the drive unplugged.
  2. Submit our Chances Form. It takes a few minutes and asks for the model number and symptoms. We reply with an honest assessment of your odds and a firm price before you send anything.
  3. If you’d rather move straight to it, use the mail-in form or, if you’re in Los Angeles, the drop-off form. One form per device.

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