Hardwired IT provides on-site data recovery across Ottawa, sending a technician to your home to recover deleted files, photos, and documents from failed, corrupted, or unreadable hard drives, SSDs, and USB drives. The technician assesses the drive at your location before running anything, and gives you an exact quote before any recovery work begins.
A Gatineau accounting firm called us when their four-bay NAS dropped offline mid-week and their backups had silently stopped months earlier. On-site I found the array was running RAID 5 with one member drive already dead and a second drive throwing reallocated-sector errors — a degraded array one bad read away from total loss. Before attempting any rebuild, I pulled the failing member and imaged it sector by sector to a fresh disk with ddrescue, letting it retry and skip the unstable sectors so I wasn't stressing a dying drive during recovery. With a clean clone of the weak member plus the surviving drives, I reassembled the array read-only, verified the parity, and pulled a full 2.3TB back — every client file, database, and shared folder intact. The whole job ran on their premises; no drive left the office and nothing was written to the originals.
Hard drives and SSDs fail in two ways: logical failures and physical failures. Logical failures happen when the file system, partition table, or directory structure is corrupted — but the drive hardware still works. These are almost always recoverable on-site. Physical failures involve damaged read/write heads, failed circuit boards, or mechanically seized platters — these require a professional cleanroom lab.
We assess every drive on-site first. If it's a logical failure, we can often recover your data at your home within a few hours. If it requires physical recovery, we'll refer you to a certified lab and walk you through the process honestly.
Stop using the drive immediately. Every read and write cycle risks overwriting recoverable data. Do not run chkdsk, format the drive, or install recovery software on the affected drive itself. If the drive is making clicking or grinding sounds, power it off — continued operation with physical damage reduces recovery chances significantly. Call us as soon as possible — power down and call us — DIY tools overwrite the exact sectors we recover from.
The first thing we do is listen to the drive, not run software on it. A clicking or grinding drive has physical damage — running recovery software on it can cause further read/write passes that overwrite the very sectors we're trying to recover. In those cases, we image the drive first, creating a sector-by-sector clone to a separate device, then work from the clone.
A customer in Orléans called about a Seagate external drive that had stopped showing up in Windows after she unplugged it without ejecting — years of family photos she'd been told elsewhere were gone. The drive itself sounded healthy, which pointed to a logical failure rather than physical damage: the partition table was corrupted, but the data was still intact underneath. We imaged the drive first, then rebuilt the file system from the clone and pulled every photo onto a new drive in about two hours. For logical failures like this, the on-site success rate is high, because the data is still there — the file system just doesn't know where to point.
We're straightforward about what we can and can't do. If your drive needs a cleanroom — a physically failed drive with seized heads or damaged platters — we tell you that immediately and refer you to a certified lab rather than attempting something that would reduce your chances. The consultation and assessment are always free.
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Or call us: (613) 416-9482
In many cases, yes — deleted files, corrupted drives, and drives that won't boot are often recoverable. We assess the drive first and tell you honestly what's recoverable before any charges.
Absolutely. Our technicians are background-checked and sign confidentiality agreements. We never access your personal files beyond what's needed to recover them.
No — if a drive is making noise or files are disappearing, stop using it and power down. Continued use can overwrite recoverable data. Call us before the problem gets worse.
You'll get a free, upfront assessment and a flat-rate quote before we begin. With our no-fix-no-fee guarantee, you only pay if we recover your data.
We recover data from HDDs, SSDs, USB drives, SD cards, and external drives. We handle logical failures (deleted files, corrupted partitions) on-site. Physical failures requiring cleanroom recovery are referred to a certified lab with your consent.
Logical recovery from a functioning drive typically takes 1–3 hours on-site. If your drive has physical damage, lab recovery takes 5–10 business days on average.
Stop using the drive immediately — every read/write cycle can overwrite recoverable data. Don't try recovery software yourself. Call us as soon as possible for the best chance of a full recovery.