Wigston keeps its own character at the southern edge of Leicester — two parish churches, the framework knitters' house on Bushloe End, a long run of small traders through the middle. Media that comes from LE18 is mostly domestic or nearly so: a household desktop, a sole trader's laptop, an external disk carrying twenty years of photographs with no second copy anywhere.
Anything posted from Wigston is looked at free of charge. A single written figure arrives before the work does: £300 + VAT one drive or SSD, £250 + VAT a card or stick, arrays from £500 + VAT.
The commonest arrival is a drive that is mechanically fine and logically wrecked. Windows announces that the disk is not formatted, or the volume shows as RAW, or a folder that held everything is suddenly empty. That is nearly always the index rather than the contents: the map has been damaged and the files are still lying where they always were, unreferenced. Rebuilding a file system from the fragments underneath it is routine work, and it is why the first advice is always to stop rather than to try harder.
Windows will offer to scan and repair the disk, and on a healthy drive with a scrambled index that offer is fine. On a drive that is dying it is the worst button available. CHKDSK writes its corrections onto the same surface it is already struggling to read, it discards what it cannot make sense of, and it has a habit of turning a broken directory into thousands of numbered fragments in a FOUND folder that no longer carry names or dates. The prompt to format a drive is the same trap wearing different clothes. If a volume asks for either, decline, shut the machine down, and leave the disk alone until somebody can image it.
Small sticks make up a good share of the rest. A pen drive snapped off in a front USB port while the tower was under a desk, a card out of a dashcam, a stick that held the only copy of a quote or a set of drawings. Cards, USB sticks and pen drives are £250 + VAT. Where the flash chip itself is intact and only the connector or the controller has gone, the odds are good; where a card has been physically broken through the chip, that is chip-level work, which is one of the published exclusions from no fix, no fee.
The sole traders along Leicester Road and Blaby Road are a household with invoices attached. The accounts package, the customer list, the photographs of finished jobs and the VAT records all live on one machine, backed up to a second drive on the same desk if at all. Once whatever survives comes home, treat that copy as the start of a habit rather than the end of a problem: three copies of anything that matters, on two different kinds of media, one of them somewhere other than the building it came from. Nothing else has ever worked as reliably as that.
Wigston has no unit to call at and there is nothing to collect from, so the drive goes in the post. Out of the machine, padded so it cannot shift, tracked and insured to the Cambridge lab on Vision Park — or handed to reception there in person, Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm. An external drive keeps its case and its cable and goes as a whole. A phone or a tablet is not something this bench accepts at all, so if that is where the photographs are, save yourself the postage.
The diagnostic is free and closes 2 working days after the media is booked in, ending in one written figure that stays put: £300 + VAT for a single hard drive or SSD, £250 + VAT for a card or memory stick, £400 + VAT for an encrypted or recorder drive, from £500 + VAT for a NAS or array by member count. Most single-drive recoveries are done 2 to 4 working days after approval. Logical faults are no fix, no fee, so a failed attempt on deleted files or a corrupt file system costs nothing; physical work is half up front with the balance only on success. Freephone 0800 689 0668.
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, a single drive or SSD is £300 + VAT, and a card or a stick is £250 + VAT.