Devices · laptops and tower PCs
Looking at it costs you nothing. One drive is £300 + VAT, a figure put in writing before anything chargeable begins. Nine machines in ten come in with a dead screen, mainboard or charging circuit and a disk behind them that has not been touched. Occasionally the disk is itself the fault, which is a different job. Either way, the disk is what we want, and from Nottingham it travels as a small parcel.
Ask an engineer, and the first look is free
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| What is happening | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| HP 301: SMART Hard Disk Error, Hard Disk 1 | That disk has already been failed by SMART, 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 | A connector worked loose, or a disk that has gone |
| Dell ePSA: Error Code 2000-0142 | ePSA has failed the disk, usually on account of the heads | Do not put it through a second time |
| Dell ePSA: Error Code 2000-0146 | The disk's log has been gathering errors for a good while | 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 will not read, and quite possibly much else | 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 device picks up a case number the day it arrives, and an engineer then establishes what has genuinely gone wrong — at no cost, and ahead of everything else. Two things come back to you together: a plain account of what can be lifted and what cannot, and one fixed figure in writing. Agree to that figure, or turn it down and pay nothing.
Anything that unclips comes out on the day the parcel lands, and the rest of the machine goes on a shelf until the job is done. With the flash soldered down there is nothing at all to unplug, so the work moves to the board and each chip is read in place.
A drive that really has failed joins the normal HDD or SSD queue instead. Where the machine is dead but its drive is sound, the image is all there is to do.
Fresh media carries whole user profiles home — documents, desktop, mail stores — arranged as they were found, with the return postage paid at this end. You approve the file listing first; the invoice follows it, never the reverse.
The file list reaches you before any invoice does. Say yes and it is billed; say no and it is not — and on most jobs, if nothing comes back there is nothing to pay. Whatever comes off goes home on media bought in for your case, carriage at our end. Nothing here is closed until you have opened those files on your own machine.
What reaches us from around here: work laptops under BitLocker out of Lace Market offices and off Pride Park in Derby, machines reissued and re-imaged across a Litchurch Lane supplier, and an Ilkeston sole trader's accounts PC that doubles as the family computer. The pattern is the same on all of them: once the maker's own diagnostic has named the disk, the disk is generally the fault, and it becomes ordinary drive work of the sort our hard drive and SSD pages describe.
The laptop had gone; inside it, a disk that was only clicking. A matching donor gave up its heads, the imaging pass was deliberately run slow, and by day three she had her marks, her reports and five years of lesson plans.
Where the drive sits in a caddy, or lifts out from under one screw, that is all that needs to travel — cheaper postage, and a small parcel copes with the journey better. It is a two-minute job with a screwdriver, and any repair shop will do it for you. Two exceptions: flash soldered down, and simply not knowing. Either way, box the machine as it is.
Almost always. The disk outlives the machine in most cases: what ends a laptop is usually its screen, its mainboard or its charging circuit. Getting a healthy drive out of one that will not start again is among the quickest and cheapest jobs here.
Only if the key has gone. Encrypted volumes are routine here, several in a normal week, provided the password or the 48-digit recovery key travels in the parcel with the machine. With neither, the volume stays shut, exactly as designed. Dig yours out before you post anything.
Often a great deal. Only part of the disk gets written over by an installation; the rest stands as it did. It is what happens next that eats the remainder — so shut it down, put it aside, and use something else.
The look costs nothing. What comes back to you is a file list — what opened, what did not — plus one figure to finish the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. Most jobs carry no fee at all unless the data comes back. Leave the drive switched off until you have that list.