Hard disks fail in a small number of recognisable ways, and what you do in the first few minutes matters more than which lab you eventually choose. This page identifies the fault from the noise and the behaviour, sets out exactly how a Leicester job runs from the first phone call to the returned files, and gives the figure in advance: £300 + VAT for a single drive, diagnosed for nothing first.
£300 + VAT for any single HDD or SSD, quoted in writing after a free diagnostic. That diagnostic closes two working days after your drive is booked in, and finished single-drive recoveries usually run two to four working days from authorisation.
The noise a hard disk makes and the way the machine reacts to it narrow the fault down a long way before anybody opens anything. Find yours here, and note the recurring instruction: stop powering it up.
The heads are trying to find their reference position, failing, and retrying. This is mechanical and it does not improve with rest, freezing or a different cable. Every additional spin-up costs you surface. Switch it off at the wall and send it in for imaging on hardware built for disks in this state.
Usually a power problem or a board fault: an underfed USB port, the wrong adapter, a burnt protection component after a surge. Sometimes it is a seized motor. None of it needs the platters touching, and repeatedly retrying with different cables achieves nothing except more spin-ups.
Rest a finger on the case as it powers up. Nothing at all points at the controller board, a blown fuse or a dead motor rather than at the recording surfaces, which is often better news than it sounds. Board and chip-level work is outside no fix, no fee and takes half the figure upfront.
The hardware is answering and the file system is not. RAW volumes, a missing partition, a format prompt, folders full of unreadable names. Cancel every offer to format or initialise. This is logical work, done on a copy, and it is covered by no fix, no fee.
Weak sectors that each take seconds to return, multiplying every hour the disk stays powered. The correct response is to stop using it immediately rather than to try one more copy. A drive in this state has a limited budget of working hours and each stalled copy attempt spends some of it.
A running drive that is dropped usually parks its heads on the surface. If it has not been powered since, resist the temptation entirely — do not check whether it still works. If it has, note that down honestly, because it changes what the bench expects to find and how the imaging is approached.
The worst sound on the list, and the one where switching off matters most. It suggests contact between heads and platter, which removes recording surface with every rotation. Imaging is still possible in many cases, and how much of it is possible depends almost entirely on how quickly the power came off.
First, a conversation or the online diagnostic form. Eight questions about what the drive is, what it is doing and what has already been tried gets you a realistic expectation before you have spent anything, and it lets the job be flagged before the parcel arrives.
Second, the drive travels. Post it tracked and insured, or drive it over and hand it in. Either way it stops being handled and starts being looked after.
Third, it is booked in and you are told it has arrived. That is the moment the clock starts.
Fourth, the free diagnostic. It closes two working days after booking in — never sooner, because a proper assessment of a failing disk takes that long — and it establishes what has failed, what is realistically recoverable and what the work involves.
Fifth, a fixed price in writing with a realistic date. Nothing happens until you say yes. If the answer is that the data is not recoverable, you are told that plainly and it costs you nothing.
Sixth, the work: image first on hardware built for failing disks, then everything else against the copy, then your data returned on separate media with a file list you can check against what you expected.
Take the disk out of the laptop, the tower or the all-in-one and send just the disk. Nothing is dismantled at this end, a machine costs far more to post and arrives with more to damage, and a bare drive is what the bench actually needs. Any repair shop will remove one in a few minutes if you would rather not, and on most laptops it is a single panel and four screws.
Four exceptions run the other way and they matter. An external drive stays sealed in its own enclosure. A NAS travels complete with its disks in their bays. A WD My Passport or My Book goes whole with its cable, because on those the encryption key lives on the bridge board rather than on the disk — separate them and the data becomes unreadable to anybody, including a laboratory. A Fusion Mac needs both of its drives, each labelled. A RAID or server is the reverse: member disks only, labelled with their bay order, chassis photographed first.
The one situation nobody can work around is storage soldered to a mainboard, as on Apple Silicon Macs and some very thin laptops. If it does not come out, there is nothing to post and no honest way to help.
HDD work reaches this bench from every part of the county and the pattern is always the same: an external disk that held the only copy of ten years of photographs, a desktop in a home office in Oadby or Wigston, a laptop from a student at either university or De Montfort three weeks before a deadline, a shop till system on Belgrave Road, a design machine in the Cultural Quarter, a records disk from a practice in Market Harborough or Melton Mowbray. The postcode changes nothing about the price, the queue or the answer.
A single hard disk or SSD is £300 + VAT, whatever failed and however it failed. That figure covers internal drives, external drives, NVMe and the disk out of a laptop or desktop. Memory cards, USB sticks and pen drives are £250 + VAT. A recorder disk from a CCTV or DVR system is £400 + VAT, as is an encrypted volume where you can supply the key. Multi-disk storage — RAID, NAS, SAN or a server — starts at £500 + VAT and rises with the number of members. Forensic work is £800 + VAT with a full written report and £400 + VAT for a binary image with deleted-file extraction and no report.
Ransomware is priced as ordinary media: £300 + VAT for a drive, from £500 + VAT for an array. It is never quoted as forensic work.
Logical recoveries carry no fix, no fee, so if nothing usable comes back there is nothing to pay. The published exclusions are electronic failures, mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs. Where the fault is physical, 50 per cent of the quoted figure is payable upfront, before the drive is opened, because donor parts and clean-air bench time are spent whatever the outcome. Firmware work counts as logical and stays inside the guarantee.
Nothing on that list changes according to who you are or how the job goes. The figure agreed after the diagnostic is the figure invoiced.
The free diagnostic closes two working days after the drive is booked in. Finished single-drive recoveries are usually two to four working days from authorisation. Mechanical work takes longer, because a matched donor has to be found before anything is opened, and multi-disk jobs take longer still. You get a date with the quotation rather than a guess on the phone.
The lab is Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD. From Leicester it is about 70 miles: the M1 south to J19, then east on the A14, roughly an hour and a half, with the building two minutes off Junction 32 and parking outside the door. Drop-offs are welcome Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm and somebody will take the drive off you at reception.
Most people post instead, and it is the sensible choice. A tracked, insured parcel handed over in Leicester in the afternoon is normally booked in at Cambridge the next working morning, which beats a round trip and is far gentler on a disk that is already struggling. Print the shipping and booking-in form, write down a name, a number you actually answer and a line about what happened, and put it in the box with the drive. There is no counter in Leicester and no collection service anywhere in this network.
Post it tracked from Leicester in the afternoon and it is normally on the Cambridge bench the next working morning.
A padded box and a tracked label do more for a struggling disk than any amount of driving around with it. Royal Mail Special Delivery handed over in Leicester in the afternoon is generally on the Cambridge bench the following working morning, which is faster than most people manage in person.
The general rule is the drive travels and the machine stays behind — out of the laptop, out of the tower, out of the iMac, out of the recorder under the counter. This bench does not dismantle equipment, and a repair shop will do it while you wait. Three things are the other way round, and getting them wrong costs you the recovery: an external drive stays sealed in its own case, a NAS comes as a complete unit, and a WD My Passport or My Book travels whole with its cable, because on those the encryption key is held on the bridge board rather than on the disk — separate the two and the data becomes unreadable even to us. A Fusion Mac needs both of its drives, each labelled. The one thing nobody can work round is flash soldered onto the mainboard, as on Apple Silicon machines: if it will not come off, there is nothing to post.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Cambridge Data Recovery. It is about seventy miles from Leicester if you fancy driving it — M1 south to Junction 19, then the A14 east — and the lab is two minutes off Junction 32 with parking at the door. Posting costs you a stamp and a day instead. Whichever you choose, you hear from us the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes two working days after that.
Not certain what belongs in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape it up, or let the free online diagnostic ask the questions for you.