Mechanical hard drives from towers, laptops, workshops and recorders across the city and the county, recovered at a flat £300 + VAT a drive. This page covers what an HDD failure looks like, why a spinning disk gives you a window that an SSD does not, and exactly how a drive gets from Coventry to the bench when there is no local counter to walk into.
A single HDD from anywhere in Coventry or Warwickshire is £300 + VAT, quoted in writing after a free diagnostic. The bench is at Oxford — fifty-five miles down the M40, drop-offs Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. There is no Coventry counter and nobody collects.
The mix of work coming out of the city and the county is fairly consistent, and it says something about who still relies on a spinning disk in a world that has mostly moved to solid state.
A tower under a desk, five or six years old, that boots to a black screen or a repair loop on Monday morning. The disk inside has usually been showing reallocated sectors for months with nobody watching. It is the single most common HDD job that arrives from Coventry, and it is generally readable if it is switched off promptly.
CAD and simulation data, scan files, dyno and test-rig output from the workshops and design offices around Whitley, Gaydon and the Ansty estates. These are often big drives holding project work that exists nowhere else, and the deadline is usually a build or a customer sign-off rather than a backup schedule.
A machine kept going long past its retirement because everything is on it. Twenty years of pictures, scanned documents, letters, a music collection. Nothing has ever been copied off because copying it off has never quite reached the top of the list. These are frequently straightforward once the drive is on a proper controller.
Fieldwork, datasets and thesis drafts from Coventry and Warwick, usually on an external disk that has been carried between home, a lab and a library for two years. The write-up deadline tends to arrive at the same moment as the fault, which is why these are the most anxious calls of the lot.
CCTV and DVR drives from retail units, garages and distribution yards along the M6 and M69 corridors. Someone needs footage for an insurance claim or the police and the recorder has stopped writing. These sit in their own price band because recorder file systems are proprietary and none of them behave like a computer.
A laptop or workstation disk from an office where the encryption was switched on by policy and the recovery key lives on somebody else's account. The drive itself may be perfectly healthy. With the key or the credentials to hand this is ordinary work in the encrypted band; without them there is nothing anybody can do.
HDD is the label for the traditional hard disk drive: platters that spin, heads that move across them, a motor and a circuit board. It is not the same as an SSD, which has no moving parts, and the distinction matters more than the jargon suggests. A failing HDD usually gives warning — noise, slowness, a machine that hangs for thirty seconds at a time — and it fails gradually, which means there is a window in which stopping is worth a great deal. An SSD tends to go from working to invisible in one step.
The other difference is what deleting does. On a mechanical drive, deleted data sits on the platters until something writes over it, so recovering it is routine even weeks later. On an SSD, TRIM tells the controller to clear those blocks in the background, and once that has happened the data is genuinely gone rather than hidden. It is the single most useful thing to know about the two, and it is why the advice for an HDD is nearly always to stop using it immediately.
Plenty of machines still around Coventry are running mechanical drives: towers in workshops and small offices, the big storage disk alongside a newer SSD in a gaming or CAD build, external backup drives, recorders, and the older laptops that get handed down and kept going. All of them are the same £300 + VAT job.
There is no shop here. This site is a Coventry-facing front for a working laboratory at Oxford Data Recovery on the Oxford Science Park, and that is where the drives go, where the clean-air bench is and where your disk is imaged. Being straight about it saves everybody time: there is no counter in the city centre, no unit on a trading estate to call at, and no engineer driving round Warwickshire collecting drives.
What there is instead is a freephone number answered during the week, a free online diagnostic that asks the questions an engineer would ask, and two ways to get the drive to the bench. Most people post it, tracked and insured, and something handed to a courier in Coventry on a weekday afternoon is normally logged in at Oxford the following morning. The alternative is to drive it: John Eccles House, Robert Robinson Avenue, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4GP, which is about fifty-five miles straight down the M40 and an hour in fair traffic. Drop-offs are taken there Monday to Friday, 9:00am to 5:30pm, with parking at the door.
Drives come in from the whole county on the same terms — Nuneaton, Bedworth, Rugby, Leamington Spa, Warwick, Kenilworth, Solihull, Stratford-upon-Avon, Atherstone and Southam — and the price does not change with the postcode.
Switch the machine off at the wall, not through the operating system if it is hanging, and leave it off. Do not reinstall Windows to see whether that fixes it. Do not run CHKDSK or a disk repair utility, because both write to a disk you want read. Do not install recovery software onto the affected drive, since the installer alone can land on top of the files you are trying to rescue.
Then take the disk out of the machine and send that alone. A laptop, a tower, an all-in-one and a recorder all stay at home; any repair shop in the city will free a drive in a few minutes if you would rather not. External drives are the exception and travel whole and sealed, as does a NAS with its disks in the bays. A Fusion Mac needs both drives labelled. RAID and server jobs send the member disks only, marked with their bay order.
One mechanical hard drive or one SSD is £300 + VAT, fixed in writing before any work starts. The other four bands are: £250 + VAT for a memory card, USB stick or pen drive; £400 + VAT for a CCTV or DVR recorder disk and for BitLocker or otherwise encrypted drives; from £500 + VAT for RAID, NAS, SAN and servers, rising as the member count does; and forensic work at £800 + VAT with a full written report, or £400 + VAT for a binary image with deleted-file extraction and no report. A ransomware-encrypted drive is priced as any other drive at £300 + VAT.
Nothing on that list changes because a job came from Warwickshire rather than anywhere else, and there is no call-out, no handling fee and no charge for the diagnostic in any band.
The free diagnostic closes two working days after the drive is booked in and produces a single fixed figure and a completion date. Nothing proceeds until you have agreed to both. From there a single drive is typically finished within two to four working days. Arrays take longer because each member disk has to be imaged before the volume can be rebuilt, and a drive needing a donor head assembly waits on the right part turning up.
Logical recoveries carry no fix, no fee. If a formatted volume, a deleted folder, a corrupt file system, a lost partition or a ransomware job produces nothing usable, there is nothing to pay. Sitting outside that guarantee are electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs, and physical work takes fifty per cent of the quoted figure before it begins. Two things cannot be taken at all: phones and tablets, in any form, and storage soldered to a mainboard, which no amount of money makes removable.
Post it or bring it to Oxford, and two working days after it is booked in you get a fixed price and a date in writing.
One drive in a padded box is the easiest parcel there is, and it is how most of this work turns up. A disk that has already begun to misbehave would far rather be still and wrapped than rattling about in a rucksack, and something posted from Warwickshire before the last collection is generally on the Oxford bench first thing.
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.