Press three buttons and this page tells you what it thinks. The first asks what class of hardware you have, the second which badge is on it, the third what it has started doing. Back comes the fault that combination has usually turned out to be, the single action worth taking today, and an honest span of days for that class of repair. Nothing personal is asked until the last step, and then only so an engineer can confirm the reading by telephone.
Diagnosis is not on the price list. Neither this page nor the full examination at Oxford is charged for. An invoice exists only after a fixed figure has been read and accepted.
Getting to a price costs nothing at any point; the figure itself is set once the media has been examined. Logical faults — a deleted folder, a formatted volume, indexing in pieces — sit on the no fix, no fee footing, so a recovery that returns nothing is not invoiced. Where the trouble is electronic, mechanical or in the surface itself, donor parts and clean-bench hours are spent before a single sector can be read, which is why half is settled at the start. Chip-level, DVR and investigation instructions are paid before they begin. Whichever applies to you appears on the written quote before anything is opened.
Address it to Oxford Data Recovery, John Eccles House, Oxford Science Park, Robert Robinson Avenue, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4GP. Questions in writing reach the bench at support@oxford-datarecovery.co.uk. The two PDFs: ↓ booking-in sheet · ↓ terms and conditions
Four boxes, and an engineer rings back with a considered view rather than a sales pitch. None of it obliges you to anything.
An engineer will read it and get back to you. If your mind is already made up and the media is going in the post, the label wants Oxford Data Recovery, John Eccles House, Oxford Science Park, Robert Robinson Avenue, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4GP.
Buttons not your thing? The line is open Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm on 0800 689 0668, and support@oxford-datarecovery.co.uk lands with the same engineers. A description in your own words is worth as much here as any of these picks.
This part is engineering, not five minutes with a downloaded scanner. The order never varies, because what one stage finds decides whether the next can be attempted safely, and the sequence finishes 2 working days after the parcel is booked in and no sooner.
Power comes first and nothing else happens until it is understood: supply rails checked, bridge and controller board tested, the drive's own ROM read out and put somewhere safe.
Heads, bearings and platter surfaces are judged with the disk stationary. No difficult read is attempted before that judgement exists.
Service area and translator are examined on the PC-3000. Nothing running on an ordinary computer can see damage at that depth.
A single careful imaging pass establishes how much of the platters, or of the NAND, will give data up, and maps where the weak ground lies.
Structures are mapped, so the answer is a list rather than a percentage: which folders are whole, which are damaged, which are past saving.
One figure, set against the fault that was actually found. Agree it and work starts; decline and the media goes home. Either way nothing has been charged.
Storage fails in a limited number of ways, and each of them tends to look and sound the same every time. A tick that repeats is a head stack looking for a position it cannot find. A beep roughly once a second is a spindle motor starting and giving up. A capacity the device never had points at a controller in trouble. An offer to format means the indexing is broken while the hardware underneath is fine. There is no prediction in any of that, only a comparison against a long queue of jobs that came in before yours.
So your three answers are matched against what that combination has meant historically, and the page returns the probable cause, what it does to the odds, and the action that protects them best. It is not an examination and does not pretend to be. Scored platters, a collapsed translator, a few thousand sectors gone quietly deaf: none of that shows up from a web page, and software claiming to see it after three button presses is selling you something.
It is also willing to be discouraging. Symptoms that need the power off say so, with the reason attached. Work the laboratory does not take — soldered flash above all, and mobile phones and tablets with it — is named on screen rather than after the postage has been paid.
Switch it off. Dull advice, and still the most valuable line on this page, because three clocks are ticking together. A failing mechanism gives up a little more of itself with every rotation. A deleted file lasts precisely as long as the space it occupied stays unused. An SSD in difficulty keeps shuffling its own translation tables while current reaches it. Cutting the power stops all three at once, and none of them starts again while the device sits in a padded box waiting for the post.
The band comes from two things only: what class of media it is, and what has failed inside it. How much the files are wanted counts for nothing. Three of the five published bands account for very nearly everything that arrives, and the figure for your own job is written down once the hardware has been examined.
Pen drives, and SD, microSD or CompactFlash cards of any capacity.
One disk of any kind, platters or flash, whatever it came out of. NVMe blades included.
Anything holding several disks — arrays, NAS boxes, servers, SANs — counted a member at a time.
Two narrower bands finish the list. £400 + VAT is the one worth pausing on, because a single point covers three jobs with nothing to do with one another: a disk taken out of a CCTV or DVR unit, an encrypted volume of any kind, and a forensic binary image with the deleted files extracted where no report has been asked for. Ask for the report as well and the instruction is £800 + VAT, settled up front, with unusually large or multi-device work scoped and quoted separately. Five figures, then, one of them doing three jobs rather than becoming three tiers. Ransomware does not add a sixth: it takes the media figures like everything else, £300 + VAT for one encrypted drive and from £500 + VAT for a server, a NAS or an array. Where the risk sits depends on which side of the logical and physical line the fault falls. Logical recoveries carry no fix, no fee: deletions, formats, broken file systems, and sound hardware a machine will not acknowledge. Exactly four things are excluded and the list does not move — electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs. Those are the jobs needing a donor board, a transplanted head stack, chips lifted off a card, or work down at firmware and service-area level, and every one of them spends money before a sector has been read. Hence 50% upfront on physical work. A few jobs each year fall outside everything above — a board burnt past reading, media in two pieces, a set that takes up a shelf — and those are quoted individually, in writing, with nothing started until you have read the figure.
Almost everything worked on here arrived in the post. A drive that is already in trouble has an easier time boxed, padded and insured than it does being carried round in a bag for an afternoon, and a parcel handed over in Coventry today is normally booked in at Oxford tomorrow morning.
As a rule the storage comes out and the machine stays where it is. That applies to a laptop, a tower, an iMac and to the recorder sitting under a counter. Taking equipment apart is not something this bench does, and a repair shop will free a drive in a few minutes. Two things go the other way: an external drive stays sealed inside its own case, and a NAS travels as a complete unit with its disks still in their bays. A Fusion Mac is a third case — both of its drives come out and travel together, each one labelled. The single situation nobody can work around is memory soldered flat onto a mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon Macs and a good many slim laptops are built: if the storage will not unbolt, there is no parcel to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Put Oxford Data Recovery on the label. From Coventry it is roughly fifty-five miles straight down the M40, about an hour if you would rather drive it in than post it. Either way you are told the moment it is logged, and the free diagnostic finishes two working days later.
Unsure what ought to go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it do the asking.
Pack the bare media properly, put your name and a contact number in the box with it, and buy a tracked, insured service.