Hi Everyone, the following questions came in via the web site and represent typical hard drive problems that many of us experience. If you are unable to recover the data yourself, data recovery sites like http://computersciencelabs.com/ provide data recovery services across the UK.

I have a Western Digital 1TB Caviar Green drive where the pcb has been damaged. I already have a replacement pcb but understand that the chip on the old pcb needs to be transferred onto the replacement pcb. The pcb does not have a u12 chip but does have the Marvell controller chip which I believe is the chip that needs to be transferred. Are you able to transfer the chip across and what price would you charge?

Western Digital My Passport 1TB external drive powers up and light comes on. It sounds like everything is spinning OK and I can see the disk drive in the Device Manager but it won't show up in Windows Explorer. If I run the WD diagnostics it sees the disk but fails. In Disk Management it shows the disk but can't initialise it due to an I/O device error. I would like to recover the data off the disk if possible. I'm not bothered about getting the disk working again if I can just get the data back.

Drive whirrs, clicks twice , repeats several times and isn't accessible. Got black screen of death, Windows won't load. Can't access system at all and wrongly thought data backed up in Dropbox. Think I'm on Windows 7. Really need to get this data back. Had guy out from a call-out company and all he could offer was to restart Windows but lose all data. Do you think you can retrieve my data or should I just give up?

I need all photos recovered from a Galaxy S3. Can you assist?

Touro Mobile USB 3.0 500 GB/Go External Harddrive. My external harddrive seems to have a dodgy connection – it will momentarily pair to the computer but then stops. Is there anything you can do to recover the files from it?

Does there anyone who can help me with my Lacie 5big network 2 please? My Lacie has been desynchronized. Its showing red light… My external portable hard drive suddenly stopped being found by my laptop. I searched for it on drive manager. Found it and tried to re-initialise it but came back with an I/O error. It has a lot of data on it (mostly music). Any suggestions? How much would recovery cost?

In all theses cases data recovery cost vary between £500 and £2000, so obviously your data has got to be worth that amount to you.