Devices · laptops and tower PCs
Looking at it costs you nothing. A drive is £300 + VAT, a price given in writing before any charges are incurred. In nine cases out of ten, a machine arrives with a dead display, motherboard or charging circuit, and the disk behind it has not been touched. On occasion the disk itself is faulty, and that is a separate job. Either way, the disk is what we need, and it travels from Nottingham as a small parcel.
Ask an engineer and the first look is free
0115 8220606
| What is happening | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| HP 301: SMART Hard Disk Error, Hard Disk 1 | SMART has already flagged this disk as failing, and the BIOS will not boot it | Take it seriously, and image the disk today |
| HP 3F0: Boot Device Not Found | There is nothing the BIOS can boot from | Probably a connector coming loose, or the disk itself |
| Dell ePSA: Error Code 2000-0142 | ePSA has failed the disk, usually because of bad heads | Do not put it through a second time |
| Dell ePSA: Error Code 2000-0146 | The disk's log has been building up errors for some time | None of this began today |
| Lenovo: 2100, BIOS cannot detect HDD0, the Main HDD | Nothing replies on that channel: cable, or disk | Image it before anyone starts pulling connectors |
| Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart, after A disk read error occurred | The boot sector can't be read, and quite likely much else besides | One more restart alters nothing |
| BIOS: Reboot and Select proper Boot Device | There is nothing there for the BIOS to start | Establish the fault before anybody reinstalls |
Your case number is assigned when the item is received. Then an engineer works out what went wrong (no charge). At this point, you receive a basic summary of which parts are recoverable and which are not. You also receive a single written quote for the price of the recovery. Accept the quoted price or turn it down, and there is no obligation to pay anything.
We do not take in laptops, just their drives. Remove the drive yourself, or have a repair shop do it, and send that to us. Laptops with flash soldered to the board are not work we take on; if you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
Drives that have actually failed go into the standard HDD or SSD queue instead. When a computer is dead but its drive is good, only an image needs to be made.
Whole user profiles, including documents, desktop and mail stores, go home on new media, arranged as they arrived, with return postage at our expense. First you approve the list of files; then your invoice is sent. Never the other way round.
A complete file list will be provided before any invoicing. Simply say "yes" or "no" to what we found: yes means it is billed, no means it is not, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. What we find is posted to you on media purchased specifically for your case, at no additional cost to you. We consider the process complete once you have opened those files yourself on your own computer.
What we receive from around here: work laptops under BitLocker from Lace Market offices and from Pride Park in Derby, reissued and re-imaged machines across a Litchurch Lane supplier, and an Ilkeston sole trader's accounts PC that also acts as the family computer. The pattern is the same on all of them: once the maker's diagnostics name the disk as bad, it almost always is, and from that point it becomes standard drive work like that described on our hard drive and SSD pages.
The laptop was gone; inside it was a disk that was clicking. A matching donor gave up its heads, and the imaging pass was run very slowly. By day three she had her marks, reports and five years of lesson plans back.
Always just the disk. When the drive sits in a caddy, or comes out after removing one screw, that's all that needs to be sent: cheaper postage, and a small parcel handles the journey much better. It takes about two minutes with a screwdriver, and any repair shop will do it for you. We do not accept flash soldered to the motherboard; if you aren't certain which type you have, ring us first. Get a quote before sending anything.
In most cases, yes. The disk outlives the machine: usually what kills a laptop is its screen, mainboard or charging circuit. Pulling a good disk from a unit that won't turn on any more is one of the fastest and cheapest things we do here.
Only if the key has gone. Encrypted volumes are commonplace here, several a week in normal times, provided the password or the 48-digit recovery key comes with the disk. Without either, the volume stays locked, as intended. Find the recovery key before you post anything.
A lot of the time, yes. Only part of the disk is overwritten when Windows is installed; the rest is left as it was. What happens next is what eats the rest, so shut it down, set it aside and use something else.
The look costs nothing. It gives you a file listing of what opened and what did not, along with the cost of finishing the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Do not switch the drive on until you have that listing.