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NDR / Devices and media / Asus and HP laptop recovery

Asus and HP · ZenBook, VivoBook, ROG, Pavilion, EliteBook

Asus and HP laptop recovery, Nottingham. Send the drive, keep the laptop — unless the flash is soldered down.

One drive is priced at £300 + VAT, with the assessment ahead of it free. Four faults account for nearly all of this work. A spinning disk that has simply run out of hours. An M.2 card whose controller has gone quiet. Storage soldered to the mainboard, where nothing lifts out at all. And BitLocker, with nobody able to find the key. Which one you have decides the work and the figure alike, and it is established before any figure is named. Most models give up their storage under one panel and a few screws; an HP Stream, an Asus Chromebook or a budget VivoBook gives up nothing, because the flash is part of the board — post the machine and say that is what you have sent. Parcels arrive from Nottingham, Beeston, Loughborough, Chesterfield, Derby and Newark-on-Trent.

No files back, no bill — on most jobs Free diagnosis first, then a single price, in writing Parcels come in from Derby, Lincoln and Loughborough

Ask an engineer, and the first look is free
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What an Asus or HP symptom points to.

Not yours? Open the fault finder →
What is happeningWhat usually causes itWhat that means for you
It halts on the Asus or HP logo and stays thereThe drive can no longer serve the files the machine starts from. Documents are generally untouchedPull the drive and post that
A tick or a light knock inside a PavilionA worn 2.5in disk whose heads are on the way outShut it down, and leave it down
The BIOS asks for a hard-disk password nobody setHP DriveLock, held in the drive's own firmware rather than in WindowsSay so before the parcel goes
An M.2 card no longer listed in the BIOSThe controller has gone quiet, though the flash sitting behind it is often untouchedPost the card on its own
BitLocker wants forty-eight digitsReal encryption, working exactly as somebody configured itTrack down the key before posting
There is no drive in there to removeThe flash is soldered to the mainboard, as on Streams and budget VivoBooksSend the whole machine instead
How to pack and post it: wedge it so it cannot move, insure the parcel for what the files are worth rather than what the drive cost, and use a tracked service to the intake lab. The journey back is on us. Would you rather an engineer went through the packing with you before the tape goes on? Ring us. It is all set out on the packing and postage guide.

Four ways an Asus or an HP stops, and what each one means.

Asus — ZenBook, VivoBook and ROGThin machines carrying an M.2 card under a single panel, and gaming laptops that often carry two of them. The budget VivoBook and Chromebook models are the exception: their flash is soldered to the board and the whole laptop has to come in. Tell us the model on the underside and we will say which one you are holding before you take a screwdriver to it.
HP — Pavilion, Envy, EliteBook and ProBookHome machines with either an M.2 card or a spinning disk in them, and business machines that add two more things to the job: DriveLock, a password living in the drive's own firmware, and BitLocker sitting above it. Neither is a reason to put off ringing, and both get answered honestly while the assessment is still free.
M.2, and the short cardsNot every M.2 slot takes the long card. Plenty of Asus and HP machines use the short 2230 size instead, and one will not stand in for the other. Read the model number off the base of the laptop and we will tell you which you have before anything is opened up.
Soldered storage, and what it changesHP Streams, Asus Chromebooks and the cheapest VivoBooks have no removable drive whatever — the flash forms part of the mainboard. There is nothing to unscrew, so the laptop travels instead, the work happens at board level, and what can be reached is established during the free assessment rather than promised in advance.

From the parcel arriving to the files going home.

Jobs already finished →
01

Booked in the day it arrives, and the first look is on us Free

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.

The first look is freeOne fixed figure, in writingNo charge at this point
02

The drive comes out before anything is powered

Nobody here restarts a laptop in the hope of a different answer. The storage comes out — a 2.5in disk on the older machines, an M.2 card on the newer — and goes onto a write-blocked port, which settles the one question worth asking this early: machine, or drive? Where the machine is to blame, the job becomes a plain copy and costs accordingly.

Read behind a write blockerMachine or drive, told apart
03

Copied before any repair is attempted

Every later step works against the image, never against what arrived in the post. Where a spinning disk has finished its heads, it is opened in filtered air and given a donor stack matched by model and by production batch. Where an M.2 card grows unreliable as it warms, it is read in bursts, with a cooling rest between each, and the difficult ground is left until the easy ground is safely down.

Filtered air where the heads have goneM.2 cards kept cool, read in bursts
04

Opened here before it goes home

Nothing leaves here on our say-so. What came off gets opened on the bench — documents, spreadsheets, photographs, mailboxes, game saves — and the folder tree is compared with the description you gave over the telephone. The files you told us mattered are opened right through, not ticked off against a list.

Every file opened hereWhat you named gets checked first
05

The file list comes before the bill

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.

Nothing is charged until you agree the figureNew media, bought in for your jobWe pay to send it home

What comes in most often

  • The logo screen accuses nobody — it reports one thing only, which is that the machine could not read its start-up files. Three quite different faults produce it: a disk worn out by hours, a damaged Windows installation, or a card that has shifted in its socket. Only by reading the storage do you find out which.
  • Some of these machines have no drive to remove — HP Streams, Asus Chromebooks and the cheapest VivoBooks solder their flash to the mainboard, so there is no panel, no screw and no card. Those arrive whole, they are read at board level, and they are the single exception to everything else written on this page.
  • Gaming machines often stripe two cards — an ROG or an Omen set up with a pair of M.2 cards in one volume is quick and carries no margin at all, so when one card stops answering the whole volume goes with it. Both cards travel together, both get copied, and the volume is put back over the copies.
  • Encryption is answered before you pay a penny — a modern HP business laptop is frequently encrypted from the day it was handed over, and BitLocker without its key stays shut here and everywhere else. Four places usually hold that key: a Microsoft account, a firm's directory records, a memory stick, or a printout in somebody's file. Check all four, and ring us either way.

The two hard edges on this page: nobody anywhere gets past encryption without the password or the recovery key, whatever the advertising claims, so a volume locked without one stays locked. And a platter that a worn head has scored no longer holds what those tracks held — data that has stopped being physically present is not retrieved by anyone. Overwriting works the same way, so a reinstall followed by a few weeks of normal use permanently takes part of what was there. You are told both of those while the work is still free. One drive is £300 + VAT, confirmed on paper once the free assessment is finished, and three to four working days is usual between the parcel arriving and the files going home on fresh media. Storage only here, so no phones and no tablets, and where the drive gives up nothing at all, most jobs are not charged for.

One of these, from start to finish.

NG · NTG-2026-2001ON THE LOG ✓

An EliteBook that got slower for a year and then stopped at the logo

Nine years of tenancy files, valuations and site photography sat on an HP EliteBook belonging to a land agent in Grantham — a machine the practice's IT had never once looked at. Opening anything had been getting slower since the spring. Then one morning it reached the logo and went no further. Out came the spinning disk. On a write-blocked port it read, though slowly, and a band around the middle would not answer at any speed at all. That band was left alone until the rest of the surface was down safely, and then taken across two nights in short passes. Before a single file travelled, each folder was opened on the bench, beginning with the tenancy agreements and the valuations, since those were the ones named over the telephone.

Each folder opened before it went backThe whole disk copied before a repair

What helps, and what does damage.

Worth doing first

  • Shut it down now and leave it that way
  • Read us exactly what is on the screen
  • Tell us if a BIOS or drive password was ever set
  • Bag the drive antistatically and send that alone

What makes it harder

  • Restarting it once more to see if it catches
  • A fresh Windows install on that disk
  • Letting Windows run a repair over a failing drive
  • Writing anything new to the disk you need

Answers before you spend anything.

Nothing happens past the HP logo. Is the disk finished?

Possibly, though that identical screen turns up for two or three other reasons, and looking at it will not tell you which. The machine is reporting one fact: it could not read its start-up files. That fits a disk worn out by hours. It fits a damaged Windows installation just as well, and an M.2 card that has worked loose in its socket. Every restart puts the weak area under the same demand again and settles nothing. Leave the laptop off, post the storage on its own, and a few minutes of free assessment separates those three.

The BIOS wants a hard-disk password and nobody remembers setting one.

That will be DriveLock. The password lives in the drive's own firmware rather than anywhere inside Windows, and HP business machines have carried the feature for a very long time. While it stays set the drive will not answer an ordinary bench port, so mention it before the parcel is sealed, because it changes what the assessment has to deal with first. Laptops handed down from a previous employer, or from an in-house IT team, generally have their answer sitting with those people — ask before you assume it has gone.

BitLocker is asking for forty-eight digits and we have not got them.

Then the volume stays closed. That is not a limit of this bench: BitLocker is behaving exactly as it was configured to behave, and nobody anywhere gets past it without the key. What is worth knowing is how often the key turns out to exist after all — a Microsoft account, a company's directory records, a memory stick in a drawer, a printout filed by whoever set the machine up. Try all four. The volume can be imaged in the meantime and that copy kept safely while you search, and none of this costs you anything to find out.

Do you want the laptop, or only the drive?

The drive, on nearly every model. One panel, a few screws underneath, and out comes either the M.2 card or the spinning disk — antistatic bag, padded box, nothing else required. A whole laptop costs more to post and gives the courier more to damage. One exception matters: HP Streams, Asus Chromebooks and the cheapest VivoBooks have their flash soldered to the mainboard, so nothing lifts out and the machine itself must travel. Ring if you cannot tell which of the two you own. Nothing is collected here and there is no counter, so everything arrives by post, tracked and insured.

Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.

When the server will not start → Mirrored RAID 1 sets → Files locked up by ransomware → The full device list →

Switched off, a drive cannot get any worse.

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.

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Send it for a free look Posting it to Manchester