Clicking, grinding, painfully slow, or not showing up at all? Dave's Computers in Somerville, NJ diagnoses and repairs failing hard drives — HDD and SSD, in laptops, desktops, and external enclosures. We find out exactly what's wrong before a dollar is spent on fixing it.
The classic sound of mechanical failure — the read/write heads are struggling. This gets worse, never better.
Minutes to boot, programs hanging, the spinning cursor everywhere. A drive dying of bad sectors drags the whole computer down.
Files that won't open, folders that come and go, errors when saving. The drive is losing its grip on your data.
"No boot device found," "Operating system not found," or endless repair loops that never finish.
"Hard disk failure is imminent" — the drive's own self-test is telling you it's dying. Believe it.
The computer or BIOS no longer sees the drive at all — or an external drive that stopped appearing when plugged in.
Here's the honest version most shops won't spell out. "Hard drive repair" means different things depending on what's wrong, and the diagnostic tells us which situation you're in:
When the drive hardware is healthy but the file system is damaged — corruption from a crash, power loss, or bad shutdowns — we repair the file structure, remap bad sectors, and verify the drive is trustworthy going forward.
When the drive itself is failing, "repair" means safely moving everything — Windows, programs, files, settings — onto a healthy new drive before the old one dies. Done right, you can't tell anything changed except the speed.
If your failing drive is an old spinning HDD, replacing it with a solid-state drive (SSD) makes the computer dramatically faster than it ever was. Same repair, better outcome — we'll show you the options at the quote.
Walk in with the computer or the bare drive — no appointment needed.
Full drive health check: mechanical condition, sector scan, S.M.A.R.T. data. $75, credited toward the repair.
Exact quote first. Then we fix the file system, or clone everything to a new drive — your call, fully informed.
Booting, tested, verified. Most drive jobs done in 24–48 hours after diagnosis.
Every job starts with the $75 diagnostic, credited toward your repair. From there, the total depends on what the drive needs: a software-level repair is quoted as flat labor, and a clone-and-replace is labor plus the new drive — which varies with the capacity and type (HDD or SSD) your system needs. You get the exact number before any work begins, and if you decide not to proceed, you've spent $75 and know precisely what's wrong.
Most repairs finish in 24–48 hours after diagnosis. One honest caveat: cloning a large or badly degraded drive can't be rushed — a healthy drive copies in hours, but a failing one must be read slowly and carefully to get everything off intact. We'd rather take an extra day than lose your data to impatience, and we'll give you a realistic timeline at the quote.
Right here in Somerville: Dave's Computers, 75 N Bridge St, Somerville NJ 08876 — behind Bank of America. Walk-ins welcome Mon–Fri 10am–5pm and Sat 9am–2pm. We've been repairing drives for central New Jersey since 2011, with 400+ Google reviews behind the counter. No mail-in, no waiting weeks — your drive stays in the building.
Both happen, and the diagnostic tells us which. Software-level damage — corrupted file systems, bad sectors, boot errors — is genuinely repairable and the drive can keep serving. Mechanical failure inside the sealed drive is not economically repairable; the fix is cloning everything to a new drive while the old one can still be read. Roughly speaking, if it's behaving badly it may be fixable; if it's making noises, it's replacement time.
The clicking itself can't be — that's the read/write mechanism physically failing, and it only gets worse with every power-on. What we can usually do, if you stop using it promptly, is read everything off it onto a new drive so you lose nothing. The sooner it comes in, the better the odds.
No — please don't. It's an internet legend from a much older generation of drives, and on modern drives condensation from freezing typically finishes the drive off for good. If the data matters, the only right move is powering it down and letting someone with proper equipment read it.
Yes — that's the point of cloning. We copy the entire drive — operating system, programs, files, settings, everything — onto the replacement. When you boot up, it looks exactly like your computer, just healthier and usually much faster.
Almost always yes. Solid-state drives have no moving parts to wear out, and replacing an old spinning drive with an SSD is the single biggest speed upgrade most computers can get. Since the labor is the same either way, the swap is usually worth it — we'll price both options at the quote.
Yes. SSDs fail differently — no clicking, just sudden slowdowns, disappearing drives, or write errors — but the process is the same: diagnose, then repair the file system or clone to a new drive. SSD failures give less warning, so don't sit on the symptoms.
Yes — laptop and desktop drives both, including the M.2 sticks in modern laptops. Bring the whole machine; we handle the disassembly.
Yes. External drives are regular drives in a USB enclosure, and often it's actually the enclosure or its connector that failed — not the drive. That's a much cheaper fix, and the diagnostic tells us which one you're dealing with.
S.M.A.R.T. is the drive's built-in self-monitoring, and a failure warning means it has already detected degradation — reallocated sectors, pending failures, read errors. You can technically keep using it; you shouldn't. Back up now and bring it in — a S.M.A.R.T. warning is the cheapest stage at which to fix a drive problem.
Spinning drives typically run 3–5 years; SSDs often longer but not forever. Age matters less than symptoms — a two-year-old drive that's clicking is in far more danger than a six-year-old drive running clean. If your drive is past five years and slowing down, a proactive clone to a new drive is cheap insurance.
Sure — we can test and work on a bare drive. That said, bringing the whole computer lets us verify the repair end-to-end (boot, drivers, everything working), so if it's not a hassle, bring the machine.
Yes — 90 days on our work, and any new drive we install carries its own manufacturer warranty on top (typically 1–5 years depending on the drive).
Every symptom on this page gets worse with time. $75 diagnostic, credited toward the repair · Most jobs done in 24–48 hours · 75 N Bridge St, Somerville NJ · Mon–Fri 10–5 · Sat 9–2.
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