These jobs always land at the wrong hour. A machine gives up on the morning something is due, or starts cycling through restarts on the one evening set aside for putting the photographs somewhere safer, or meets a mug of tea before nine o'clock. The laptop itself may well be finished. What it was holding usually is not, and those are two separate questions with two separate answers. Drives arrive here from all over Leicester and from Loughborough, Coalville, Oadby, Wigston and the villages in between.
Every laptop that arrives here is examined at no charge. The figure quoted afterwards is put in writing and settled before anybody reaches for a screwdriver: £300 + VAT on any one hard drive or SSD, an NVMe blade counted the same.
Logical recoveries carry no fix, no fee. The named exceptions to it are electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs; physical work takes 50% up front. The five bands are set out in full on the data recovery cost page.
Tracing a symptom back to the failure underneath it is where the real work begins, and these thirty account for all but a handful of the boxes opened at the Cambridge bench. A fault missing from the list is not an unfamiliar one — describe it on the telephone and you will get a straight view of the odds before you spend anything on postage.
Charging boards, DC jacks and power circuits fail on a schedule of their own that has nothing to do with where your files are kept. A good share of the laptops written off across Leicestershire this year were carrying storage in perfect health. The only question worth answering first is which of the two components actually stopped, and a bench settles that in under an hour.
Heads flying a few nanometres above a spinning platter have just been introduced to it. What you hear afterwards is a rasp or a repeating tick, and every further attempt to boot drags damaged heads across more of the surface. That means matched donor parts fitted under filtered air. Mechanical work sits outside no fix, no fee and takes 50% up front.
Liquid runs downhill through a laptop and reaches the board long before anybody gets it upside down. Corrosion then continues quietly for weeks. The storage is usually the last thing affected because it sits in its own bay. Do not dry it out and try it, because a shorted rail is what turns a wet machine into a dead drive.
Windows is failing to read something it needs and retrying. The cause is either a disk with unreadable sectors in the wrong place or a file system that has come apart, and the two look identical from a chair. Repeated reboots mean repeated reads across whichever region is failing, which is the opposite of what helps.
The boot record or the partition entry has gone and the firmware has nothing to hand over to. The rest of the disk is almost always intact behind it. The instinct is to reinstall so the machine is usable again, and that instinct writes over the exact region a recovery would begin from.
In a laptop the sound carries through the chassis and gets attributed to the fan more often than not. It is the actuator resetting because the heads cannot find the servo pattern. Once it has started, the number of further power-ups that improve matters is zero.
A broken display is not a data problem, and it is one of the cheaper reasons a machine gets replaced. The drive comes out, gets read here, and the files go onto fresh media. What does not happen at this end is any repair to the laptop itself, because this is a recovery laboratory rather than a workshop.
Apple Silicon machines, most recent thin ultrabooks and everything sold as a tablet with a keyboard have their flash fixed permanently to the logic board. That is outside what is done here and it is better said now than after the postage. A drive or module that releases with a screw is an entirely different proposition.
Failing hinges pull on the cable run and take out whatever they are anchored to, which on a good number of models is a corner of the mainboard. The machine is finished. The storage sits away from the damage and is read normally, and a fair proportion of these end well.
Months of gradual slowing is a disk relocating sectors it can no longer read reliably, and the failure at the end is the point where relocation ran out of room. That long warning period is the window in which a full image is easy. After it, the work is a good deal harder and the result less complete.
A feature update interrupted by a flat battery or a power cut leaves the machine unable to boot and the user profile untouched. Nothing has been deleted. Recovery is a matter of reading the volume from an image and lifting the files out, which is straightforward and one of the more common arrivals here.
A fresh installation writes a new file system across the front of the disk and the previous one stops being addressable. The old files themselves are largely intact further in, because an installer occupies a small share of the space. What ruins it is a month of ordinary use on the new installation before anyone thinks to ask.
Recent Windows laptops switch on device encryption by themselves the first time somebody signs in with a Microsoft account. A mainboard change or a firmware update then triggers the recovery screen, and the household discovers a protection they never chose. The key is usually escrowed against that Microsoft account and can be retrieved.
Anti-theft locks, firmware passwords and account locks all present as a machine that powers on and goes no further. None of them touches the storage. The drive comes out and is read on the bench, which is a good deal simpler than trying to argue the machine itself back into service.
Blocked vents and dried thermal paste raise the temperature of everything in the case, and a drive running twenty degrees above its rating develops read errors it would not otherwise have. The shutdowns are the symptom people notice. The slow damage to the disk is the one they do not.
Laptops carried open in a bag put a lot of movement into a drive that is only held by four small screws. A loose disk suffers repeated small impacts while running. The result looks like intermittent corruption long before it looks like a mechanical fault.
Flash storage stops abruptly and without warning noises. The module goes quiet on the bus and the memory behind the controller is untouched. Where the module unclips it travels here in a padded envelope on its own, which is the cheapest and quickest parcel this laboratory receives.
Plenty of machines from the middle of the last decade shipped with a small solid state drive for Windows and a spinning disk for everything else, and some of them tied the two together as a cache. Send both, labelled, because the arrangement has to be understood before either can be interpreted properly.
A head that works cold and fails warm, or a board component drifting as its temperature rises. Repeated cycles wear the pattern down. Imaging in short passes with active cooling captures far more than one long optimistic run at the kitchen table.
A Windows account that gets recreated, or a sign-in that switches from local to Microsoft, can leave the old profile intact under a different name while presenting the machine as empty. Nothing has been deleted at all. This is one of the happier outcomes on the list.
The files are encrypted where they lie and the machine is usually still perfectly healthy. Whether anything comes back depends on the variant, on whether shadow copies survived, and on what was written afterwards. It is priced as ordinary media, 300 pounds + VAT for a single drive, and it is not forensic work.
Employers send these in regularly, wiped or nearly wiped, and want to know what left the building. That is forensic work rather than recovery, it is priced at 800 pounds + VAT with a written report, and it needs to be treated as forensic from the first minute rather than after somebody has had a look around.
Damp, cold and years of stillness are hard on a mechanical disk. Lubricant stiffens and heads can bond to the platters. A machine in that condition gets its drive removed and inspected on the clean bench before it is offered power rather than after, because one hopeful start is what turns stiction into scoring.
Older machines wrote to disk during sleep and did not always park the heads first. Being carried in that state produces exactly the sort of intermittent damage that shows up as odd file errors weeks later. The pattern is recognisable on an image and it is a common story on drives from that era.
Local storage on these is small, soldered on most models, and largely a cache. If the account is still accessible the files are already elsewhere. If it is not, the honest position is that there is often very little on the device worth recovering, and that gets said before anybody spends money.
Journal damage, a superblock that has gone, or an interrupted resize. Backup superblocks and the journal itself frequently allow the volume to be reconstructed from an image with everything in place. Linux file systems are worked here in the ordinary way rather than treated as an exception.
Installing a second operating system alongside the first is where partition tables get rewritten, and getting the order wrong removes the entry for a volume that is otherwise complete. The data is untouched. Rebuilding the table from the file system structures further in is routine.
Resetting a Windows password through the recovery environment, or reinstalling to clear a forgotten one, is one of the more effective ways of losing a profile. It also destroys BitLocker key material that was sitting on the machine. Stop before doing either, and take the drive out instead.
No fault at all in some cases, just a machine that is too slow to bother with and a disk holding fifteen years of photographs. The drive comes out, the files come off, and they go back on fresh media. This is the cheapest job on the list and one that nobody should be talked out of.
It happens, particularly with matching machines in the same household. Label the drive, put a sheet of paper in the box with your name and a mobile number, and say which machine it came out of. That single sheet of paper saves more time at this end than anything else in the parcel.
Almost every call on this page starts with the assumption that a dead laptop means dead files, and almost every one of them is wrong. Charging circuits, DC jacks, mainboards, screens and hinges fail on a timetable entirely their own, and none of them has any connection to where your documents are kept. A laptop that will not power on, or powers on to a dark screen, or has a hinge that has torn the display cable out of the board, is a machine that needs replacing rather than storage that needs recovering. The useful thing is to settle which of the two actually stopped, and that is a bench job of under an hour rather than something to argue about over the phone. Where the storage releases with a screw or a clip, it comes out and travels on its own, and the laptop stays on your desk. That is also the cheapest possible parcel, because a drive or an M.2 module fits in a padded envelope and a laptop does not.
The three genuine storage faults on a laptop have three different shapes. A drop while the machine was running puts flying heads onto a spinning platter, and what you hear afterwards is a rasp or a repeating tick. Every further attempt to boot drags damaged heads across more surface, so the correct number of retries is zero. A spill reaches the board within seconds and then corrodes quietly for weeks, and the storage usually survives because it sits in its own bay away from the worst of it, provided nobody dries the machine on a radiator and powers it up to see. The third is the slow one: months of a machine getting gradually more sluggish, which is a disk relocating sectors it can no longer read reliably, ending in a failure the day relocation runs out of room. That long warning period is exactly the window in which a complete image is easy, and it is the window most people spend hoping the problem will go away.
There is a boundary in this trade that needs stating plainly rather than discovering after the postage. Storage that unclips or unscrews is worked on here. Storage soldered permanently to a logic board is not. That line runs through every Apple Silicon MacBook, through the Intel Macs from 2018 with a T2 chip, through most thin Windows ultrabooks of the last few years, through some Surface models, and through every tablet regardless of the badge. Phones and tablets are not handled here at all, in any form. On the other side of the line sit the vast majority of ordinary laptops: a 2.5-inch drive behind a panel with two screws, or an M.2 module held down by one small screw, both of which come out in a couple of minutes. If you are not certain which side yours falls on, ring 0800 689 0668 between 9:00am and 5:30pm and ask, because the answer takes a minute and the postage does not come back.
One drive or one module is £300 + VAT whatever the machine around it was worth. The free assessment comes first, closes two working days after the parcel is booked in, and produces one fixed figure in writing before any work starts. Deletions, formats and damaged file systems are logical work and are charged only if the files come back, under no fix, no fee. Head failures, burnt boards and anything needing the packages lifted off an SSD are physical or chip-level work, priced at the same figure but with half taken as a deposit first, because the donor parts and the bench time are committed to your particular device. A finished single-drive recovery normally runs two to four working days after the assessment. Where a machine held both a small SSD and a larger disk, send both and label them, because on some models the two were tied together and neither means much on its own.
What arrives from a laptop is a drive or a module, and once it is out of the machine it is handled exactly like any other piece of storage. The benches below cover the whole range, from a disk that needs opening under filtered air to a module that needs coaxing back onto the bus.
Notebook disks have thin platters and heads that park on a plastic ramp, and both are less forgiving than their desktop equivalents. Head replacements and stack removals happen under filtered air with the drive levelled and supported.
SATA and PATA in 2.5 and 1.8 inch, mSATA, M.2 in SATA and NVMe, Apple blade connectors from 2010 onward, and the ZIF ribbons a couple of makers used for a season. A drive that will not talk to your laptop frequently talks to a bench adapter.
Per-head imaging with timeouts enforced in hardware and current draw watched throughout. A drive that hangs a file manager for twenty minutes on one damaged region costs a few minutes here, because the awkward ground is deferred to the end rather than fought over first.
Translator rebuilds, defect list work and modules read back out of the service area, on both disks and flash. There is no consumer route into a firmware area and there never has been, which is why so many laptop drives get written off before anyone with the right terminal has spoken to them.
Burnt regulators and shorted protection diodes replaced, cracked tracks rebuilt, and a drive's own adaptive data carried across onto any board fitted in place of the original. Electronic work takes 50% up front and is one of the published exclusions from no fix, no fee.
Everything your storage touches has a blocker in front of it, from the first inspection to the moment the parcel goes back out. Nothing on this side of that blocker is physically capable of writing to your drive.
Notebook disks fail differently from desktop ones and the difference is worth knowing. They are physically smaller, they park their heads on a ramp rather than on the platter, and they spend their lives being moved about while running. That makes impact damage and interrupted parking the two commonest mechanical faults, well ahead of anything electronic. Flash storage in a laptop fails without any warning noise at all. Whichever you have, the figure is 300 pounds + VAT for a single drive or module, the assessment costs nothing and closes two working days after the parcel is booked in, and a finished single-drive job runs two to four working days. Logical faults are no fix, no fee. Mechanical, electronic and chip-level work takes 50% up front and sits outside the guarantee. Storage soldered to a logic board is declined, and phones and tablets are not handled here in any form.
The badge on the lid matters much less than most people expect, because five or six drive makers supplied all of them. What the badge does determine is how the storage is fitted. Lenovo ThinkPads are the easiest machines in this trade to get a drive out of and they have been for twenty years. HP Pavilions vary enormously between generations, with some models needing the keyboard off before the drive is reachable. Dell Latitudes and Inspirons are generally straightforward and the XPS line is not, because it went to soldered and semi-soldered storage early. Acer and Asus consumer machines are usually a single panel. Whatever the machine, what travels to Cambridge is the drive on its own, and what stays with you is the laptop.
MSI, Razer, Asus ROG and the heavier Dell and HP workstation machines frequently carry both an NVMe module for the system and a larger disk for storage, and on some of them the two are tied together as a cache. That arrangement has to be understood before either can be read properly, so both travel and both get labelled with which slot they came from. These machines also run hot and get carried about, which is a poor combination for a spinning disk. Where a gaming laptop has been reporting corruption under load for months, the disk in it has usually been telling the truth.
There is a hard boundary in this trade and it is worth stating plainly. Storage that unclips or unscrews is worked on. Storage soldered permanently to a logic board is not. That line runs through Apple Silicon machines, through most thin ultrabooks made in the last few years, through Surface devices depending on the model, and through every tablet regardless of who made it. Phones and tablets are not handled here at all. If you are unsure which side of the line your machine falls on, ring before posting anything, because the answer takes a minute and the postage does not come back.
Separate the storage from the machine before you make the parcel up, since a bare drive is all that ought to arrive at Cambridge. If the screws win, telephone 0800 689 0668 and somebody will talk you through it; otherwise any repair counter in Leicester will do it for very little.
Send the drive, not the laptop. A bare drive is what gets booked in here, machines are not stripped at this end, and a laptop in a parcel is a large heavy object protecting a small light one. On most models the drive sits behind a single panel held by two or three screws, and on the ones where it does not, ring 0800 689 0668 between 9:00am and 5:30pm and it can be talked through. If the screws defeat you, most repair counters in Leicester will do ten minutes with a screwdriver for very little. Post the drive tracked and insured to Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD. That is about seventy miles from Leicester, the M1 south to Junction 19 and then the A14 east, roughly an hour and a half, and the lab is two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32 with parking outside. Reception takes drop-offs Monday to Friday if you would rather drive it over. Nothing is collected from Leicester and there is no counter in the city, so the journey is your half of the arrangement. Put a sheet of paper in the box with your name, a mobile number and a line about how the fault started.
The post office does most of the work of getting a job here. A drive that is already unwell travels better boxed and insured than rattling around a car for a day of errands, and something dropped into a Leicestershire postbox this afternoon is generally logged in at Cambridge tomorrow.
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.
The examination is free, one written figure follows it, and the band covering this page is £300 + VAT on any one hard drive or SSD, an NVMe blade counted the same.