LE1 to LE9, LE18 and LE19 · Leicester
Data recovery in Leicester. A calibration run and a season of grading files; neither can be produced twice.
Two industries at opposite ends of this city have the same problem. On Corporation Road in Belgrave, beside the National Space Centre and the Soar, Space Park Leicester is a research and innovation hub of around £100m, opened by Tim Peake on 14 March 2022, with the Satellite Applications Catapult, Open Cosmos, CGI, EarthSense and the National Centre for Earth Observation among the names on the doors — and a university whose equipment has been operating continuously in space since 1967. What that work generates is instrument calibration runs, thermal-vacuum and vibration test logs, Earth-observation raster archives and one-off qualification records for hardware that exists once. Across town, the local skills partnership's World of Work Guide puts textiles and fashion at 9,092 people employed, 665 per cent above the national average: the densest garment cluster in Britain, under real commercial pressure, and full of small firms where the pattern library, the grading files and the CAD markers sit on one PC in an office above the floor. Neither a calibration campaign nor a season of markers can be shot again. Round both sit Next's head office at Enderby, the Walkers factory district at Beaumont Leys, 44,253 people in logistics on the same guide's figures, two universities, and a creative sector holding 43 per cent of the region's creative businesses. No counter in Leicester, no driver. Tracked post to the intake lab, a free examination the day it lands, and one written figure before any chargeable work.
Ask an engineer, and the first look is free
0115 8220606
What arrives from Leicester.
Not yours? Open the fault finder →| What is happening | What brings it in | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| A laptop that will not move past the maker's logo | Three years of results, and no second copy anywhere | Keep it switched off and post the drive by itself |
| An instrument PC that will not finish starting | Validated acquisition software nobody dares patch, output written locally | Send the drive on its own and leave the instrument where it is |
| A pattern-room PC that has begun clicking | The grading files, the markers and the spec sheets are all on it | Power it off at the wall; the box travels whole |
| A NAS the team bought without telling the IT department | Set up on the day it arrived and not examined since | Send it whole, still in its own case — do not open it |
| A distribution server that stopped in the middle of a rebuild | Stock, despatch and consignment records all sit behind it | Cut the power, label the disks by bay, then post them without the chassis |
Before the parcel leaves Leicester.
What Leicester asks.
Is there anywhere in Leicester to hand a drive in?
There is not, and Nottingham has none either. Imaging hardware, donor stock and the bench all live under one roof at the intake lab, so the drive travels rather than you. Its address is printed on the shipping form. A tracked, insured parcel gets opened and assessed at no charge on arrival, and we cover the postage back.
How quickly does a drive posted from LE3 come back?
Send it on a weekday and an engineer generally has it in front of him the next morning. That examination is free, and what comes out of it is one price, in writing. Most file-system and deleted-file jobs are finished within two working days. Mechanical faults take longer, since donor parts must be sourced and matched. Which sort you have is established at the outset.
An instrument PC has stopped and the results are on it. What now?
Take the power off and go no further. Repair utilities do damage, and a reinstall laid over a failing disk can finish it. An image is taken read-only first; the recovery is then worked against that image; and the disk itself comes back to you unaltered. Where a deadline hangs on particular files, say which, and those are pulled out ahead of the rest.
How does a NAS get to you from an office in LE19?
Ring 0115 8220606 before touching it. A NAS goes whole, still in its case, and opening one achieves nothing. Servers and RAID sets are the reverse: pull the disks, and write the bay on each as it comes free so the ordering is not guessed at later. Put in the member that dropped out first, send the drives bare, and stop anything rebuilding before the box leaves.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
Next door to Leicester, on the same terms
Post it from Leicester and the work starts when it lands.
Take the power off it and then leave it alone. What was it doing when it stopped? That answer is usually worth more than anything else you can hand over. Examination is free, the price comes in writing, and nothing chargeable happens until you say so.