These arrive at the worst hour available. A machine gives up on the morning something is due, or begins a restart loop on the one evening set aside for backing up the photographs, or meets a mug of tea before nine. The computer itself may be past saving. Its contents generally are not, and the two are separate questions with separate answers. Drives come in from across the city and from Bedworth, Rugby, Leamington, Warwick and the villages between them.
Looking at a laptop costs nothing. What comes out of that examination is one written figure, agreed between us before anybody picks up a screwdriver: £300 + VAT for one hard disk or SSD, an NVMe blade counting as a single drive.
Logical work is no fix, no fee. Four things sit outside that: electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic work, and anything physical is half up front. All five bands are laid out on the data recovery cost page, while data recovery services follows a postal job from the parcel to the answer.
Tracing a symptom back to whatever caused it is where the job genuinely starts, and these thirty cover very nearly every box opened on the Oxford bench. A fault that is not on the list is not an unfamiliar one: describe it over the telephone and you will get a straight reading of the odds before you have spent a penny on postage.
Charging circuits, DC jacks and power management chips keep a failure timetable of their own, and it has no bearing whatever on where your documents are kept. A great many laptops written off around Coventry each year are carrying storage in perfect order. The first question worth answering is which of the two halves actually stopped, and a bench settles that inside an hour.
Liquid reaches the board long before anyone thinks to turn the machine over, and corrosion carries on working under the surface for weeks after the outside feels dry. The storage generally escapes, because it sits in a bay of its own away from the spill. What turns a wet laptop into a dead drive is drying it on a radiator and then switching it on to see.
Heads flying a few nanometres above a moving platter have just been introduced to it. What follows is a rasp, or a tap every couple of seconds, and each further attempt to start the machine drags damaged heads across more of the ground your files sit on. The repair is a matched donor head stack fitted under filtered air, which is mechanical work: half up front, and outside no fix, no fee.
In a thin plastic body the noise travels through the whole chassis and seems to come from somewhere it does not. It is the actuator sweeping out and resetting because the servo pattern it steers by has stopped resolving. The number of further power cycles that improve a drive in that condition is nil.
Windows is trying to read something it needs, failing, and starting over. Underneath the loop is either a file system that has come apart or a disk with unreadable sectors in an awkward place, and from a chair those two look identical. Every restart is another pass across whichever region is failing.
Nothing at the front of the disk still looks to the firmware like somewhere to start, either because the boot code has been damaged or because the entry describing the volume has been lost. Everything behind that small area is nearly always intact. The temptation is to reinstall so the laptop can be used again, and setup lands squarely on the ground a recovery would work from.
A cracked panel costs more than plenty of laptops are worth, which is why so many healthy drives end their lives in a drawer inside a broken machine. The disk is taken out, imaged here, and the contents handed back on fresh media. Mending the laptop is not on offer at this end. This is a recovery bench, and the machine stays with you.
Apple Silicon machines, a good share of recent thin ultrabooks and everything sold as a tablet with a keyboard attached have their storage fixed permanently to the board. Nothing on this bench alters that, and it is better said before postage than after. Storage that releases with a screw or a clip is an entirely different conversation.
Stiffening hinges pull on the display cable and on whatever they are anchored to, and on a fair number of models that includes part of the mainboard. The machine is finished. The drive sits well away from the damage and reads normally, which is why these end better than they look more often than not.
A long gradual slowdown is a disk quietly moving sectors it can no longer read cleanly into spare ones, and the final refusal is the moment it ran out of spares. That slow period is the window in which a complete image is easy to take. Once it has closed the work is harder and the result patchier.
A large update interrupted by a flat battery or a power cut leaves a machine that will not start and a user profile that has not been touched at all. Nothing was deleted. The job is to read the volume from an image and lift the folders out of it, which is among the most routine arrivals here.
Setup builds a brand new set of file system structures at the start of the drive and simply abandons the ones that were there, without deleting what they pointed at. The documents are still further in. What costs you is the weeks of ordinary use afterwards, because every new file saved has to land somewhere.
Somebody set out to fit a faster drive, the copy failed part way, and now the original has been repartitioned or the new one holds half a system. Keep both, send both, and label them source and target. Working out which is which at this end costs a day that nobody needs to spend.
Recent Windows machines turn device encryption on without being asked, as soon as a Microsoft account signs in for the first time. A mainboard repair or a firmware change then throws up the recovery screen, and the household discovers a protection it never chose. The key is usually held against that Microsoft account and can be fetched back from it.
Firmware passwords, asset locks and account restrictions all present as a laptop that powers on and refuses to go any further, and not one of them touches the storage. Taking the drive out and reading it on the bench is a good deal simpler than arguing the machine itself back into service.
Choked vents and thermal paste that has gone to powder push every component in the case well past what it was rated for, and a disk asked to work that hot starts returning errors it would never have produced in a cool machine. The shutdowns are what owners notice. The quiet damage happening between them is what they do not.
Four small screws are all that hold it, and a laptop carried open in a rucksack puts a great deal of movement through them. A loose disk takes repeated small knocks while the platters are still turning, and the result looks like intermittent corruption for months before it ever looks mechanical.
There is no warning and no noise to listen for with flash. One day the module stops answering, while the memory sitting behind its controller remains exactly as it was. Where the module unclips, it goes in a padded envelope by itself for the price of a stamp or two, which makes it the lightest job that reaches this bench.
Machines built between roughly 2014 and 2018 often paired a modest system SSD with a roomier mechanical disk, and a few of them ran the fast one as a cache sitting in front of the slow one. Send the pair, marked with the slot each came from, because how they were tied together decides how either of them can be read.
A head that works cold and gives up warm, or a board component drifting as its temperature climbs. Every repeated cycle wears the pattern in a little further. Imaging in short passes with active cooling banks a great deal more than one long optimistic run at a kitchen table.
A profile recreated, or a sign-in switched from a local account to a Microsoft one, can leave the old folder sitting whole under a different name while the machine presents itself as empty. Nothing has actually been deleted. This is one of the happier findings on the list and it turns up more often than people expect.
The documents are scrambled where they sit and the laptop holding them is normally in good order. Whether anything returns turns on the strain involved, on any volume shadow copies that were left alone, and on how much has been saved to the disk since it happened. Ransomware sits in the ordinary media bands here at 300 pounds + VAT for one drive, and it is not dressed up as forensic work.
Employers send these in most weeks, wiped or half wiped, and the question is always what was copied off before the machine came back. Work of that kind is forensic rather than recovery: 800 pounds + VAT with a full written report, or 400 pounds + VAT for a binary image with deleted-file extraction and no report. Say so when you book it in, because a disk somebody has already browsed casually cannot be turned into evidence afterwards.
Damp, cold and years of stillness are unkind to a mechanical disk. The lubricant thickens and heads can bond to the platters. A machine in that state has its drive taken out and inspected on the clean bench before power is offered rather than after, because a single optimistic power-up is what turns a stuck head into a scored platter.
Machines of a certain age kept writing while they slept and did not always park the heads before the lid came down, so a laptop carried in that condition takes knocks with the platters still turning. What appears weeks afterwards is a scatter of files that will not open and no obvious event to blame it on. The signature is recognisable on an image and common on drives of that generation.
There is very little storage in a Chromebook, it is soldered down on most of them, and what sits on it is mainly a working copy of whatever lives in the Google account. Where that account can still be opened, the documents are somewhere else already. Where it cannot, there is often nothing on the machine worth the price of recovering, and you will be told so rather than sold something.
A damaged journal, a superblock that has gone, or a resize that was interrupted. Backup superblocks and the journal itself frequently allow the whole volume to be rebuilt from an image with the directory tree still in place. Linux file systems are ordinary work here rather than something to be sent on elsewhere.
Setting one operating system up next to another means rewriting the partition table, and a wrong answer in a setup screen can wipe out the description of a volume that is still entirely there. Nothing inside it has altered. The table gets rebuilt by reading the file system structures themselves, which is everyday work here.
Clearing a forgotten Windows password from the recovery environment, or wiping the machine to get round it, is among the reliable ways of losing a user folder, and it throws away any BitLocker key material held locally while it is at it. Neither is worth attempting. Shut the machine down and take the drive out instead.
This happens more than you would think in a household with a pair of identical machines. Label the drive, put a sheet of paper in the parcel with your name, a mobile number and which laptop it came out of, and add a line about what the machine was doing when it stopped. That sheet saves more time here than anything else in the box.
Nearly every call here opens on the assumption that a dead laptop means dead files, and nearly every one of those assumptions is wrong. Charging circuits, DC sockets, mainboards, displays and hinges fail on schedules entirely of their own, and none of them has any relationship with where your documents are kept. A machine that will not power up, or powers up to a black screen, or whose hinge has ripped the display cable away from its socket, is a computer to replace rather than storage to recover. The productive step is deciding which of the two actually stopped, and that is settled on a bench in well under an hour instead of being argued about on the telephone. Where the storage releases with a screw or a clip it comes out, travels alone, and the laptop stays where it is. It is also by a distance the cheapest parcel, since a drive or an M.2 module goes in a padded envelope and a laptop does not. If the screws win, ring 0800 689 0668 on a weekday and somebody will talk it through, or any repair counter locally will do it for very little.
A fall while the machine was running lands flying heads on a moving platter, and the sound afterwards is a rasp or a repeating tick; every attempt to boot after that drags damaged heads across more surface, which makes the correct number of retries none at all. A spill is on the board within seconds and then corrodes quietly for weeks, though the storage generally escapes, tucked into a bay of its own at some distance from the mess, so long as nobody warms the machine through and switches it on to see. The third fault is the slow one, and it is the one that gets ignored: months of a machine getting steadily heavier to use, which is a disk quietly moving sectors it no longer trusts, and it finishes on the day there is nowhere left to move them to. That long decline is precisely the window in which a full image is cheap and easy, and it is also the window most people spend hoping the problem will sort itself out.
There is a boundary in this trade better read now than discovered after the postage. Storage that unscrews or unclips is worked on. Storage soldered down is not. The boundary crosses every Apple Silicon MacBook, the T2-equipped Intel Macs from 2018, a majority of the recent thin Windows ultrabooks, several Surface models and every tablet ever built — and phones and tablets are not accepted here in any form. On the workable side sits nearly every ordinary laptop, a 2.5-inch disk behind a two-screw panel or an M.2 module fixed by a single screw, and either is free in a couple of minutes. Both count as one drive at £300 + VAT regardless of what the machine around it cost; the free examination closes two working days after booking in, and a finished single-drive job normally runs two to four working days after you approve the figure. If the machine held a small SSD as well as a larger disk, send both and label them.
Nothing about a notebook drive changes once it is out of the machine. It is a piece of storage like any other and it meets the same equipment as a disk from a tower. What follows is the part of that equipment a laptop job usually calls on.
Notebook disks use thinner platters than desktop ones and park their heads on a plastic ramp rather than on the surface, and neither arrangement forgives much. Head stack swaps and platter work are done under filtered air with the drive levelled and supported throughout.
SATA and PATA in 2.5 and 1.8 inch, mSATA, M.2 in both SATA and NVMe wiring, Apple blade pinouts from 2010 onwards, and the ZIF ribbon a couple of makers used for a season or two. A drive that refuses to speak to your laptop very often speaks to a bench adapter.
Atola and DeepSpar units read head by head with timeouts enforced in hardware and current draw watched from the first second. A damaged region that hangs a file manager for twenty minutes costs a few minutes here, because the difficult ground is set aside and returned to at the end rather than fought over first.
PC-3000 work on disks and on flash: translator rebuilds, defect list repairs and modules read back out of the service area. There is no consumer route into a firmware region and there never has been, which is why so many notebook drives are declared dead before anybody with the right terminal has spoken to them.
Failed regulators, shorted protection diodes and lifted tracks are dealt with at magnification, and where a board has to be replaced the original drive's adaptive data is moved onto it first, because two boards from the same model are not interchangeable without it. Electronic repairs take half up front and are named in the published exclusions.
Your drive meets a hardware blocker at every port it is plugged into, from the first inspection through to the copy that goes back to you. Writing to it from this side is not something the equipment is able to do.
Notebook disks fail in their own particular way. They are smaller, they rest the heads on a plastic ramp rather than on the platter, and they spend their lives being carried around while spinning, so impact and interrupted parking come well ahead of anything electronic. Flash gives no warning whatever: it works, and then it is not there. Either sort is 300 pounds + VAT for one drive or module. The examination in front of that is free, it finishes two working days from the parcel being logged in, and the recovery itself normally runs two to four working days once the figure has been approved. Logical work is covered by no fix, no fee. Mechanical, electronic and chip-level repairs are half up front and appear in the published exclusions. Soldered storage is declined outright, and no phone or tablet is accepted in any form.
The badge on the lid matters far less than most people assume, because five or six drive makers supplied every one of them. What the badge does decide is how the storage is fitted. Lenovo ThinkPads have been the easiest machines in this trade to open for twenty years. HP Pavilions vary enormously between generations and a few of them want the keyboard off before the disk is reachable. Dell Latitudes and Inspirons are generally straightforward, while the XPS range moved to soldered and part-soldered storage sooner than most. Consumer Acers and Asus machines usually want one cover off and nothing more. Toshiba Satellites, Sony VAIOs, Fujitsu Lifebooks, Packard Bells, Compaqs and Gateways still arrive here regularly out of lofts and back bedrooms, and their disks read exactly like everybody else's. Whichever badge it is, the drive travels to Oxford and the laptop stays with you.
MSI, Razer, Asus ROG and the bigger Dell Precision and HP ZBook machines usually hold two devices: an NVMe module carrying the system and a larger disk carrying everything that would not fit on it. On some models the two are bound together as a cache, and that has to be unpicked before either one means anything, so both come out, both go in the parcel, and both get marked with the slot they sat in. A gaming laptop also spends its life hot and in a rucksack, which no spinning disk enjoys. When one of these has been producing file errors during long sessions for half a year, the disk has been giving an accurate account of itself.
One boundary in this trade deserves putting in plain words rather than in small print. Storage held in place by a screw or a clip can be worked on. Storage soldered into the board cannot, by anybody. That takes in every Apple Silicon machine, a good share of the thin ultrabooks of the last few years, some Surface models depending on which one you have, and every tablet ever built. Phones and tablets are refused here outright, iPads among them. A minute on the telephone settles which side of the line your machine falls on, and a minute is better spent than the price of a parcel.
Part the storage from the machine before the box is made up, because a bare drive is all that should reach Oxford. Beaten by the screws? Ring 0800 689 0668 and somebody will walk you through it, or let a repair shop on almost any high street free it for a few pounds.
The drive travels; the laptop stays with you. Only bare drives are logged in here, nothing is dismantled at this end, and boxing up a whole machine means paying to protect the heavy half of it. Most models give the disk up behind a single cover and two or three screws. Where yours will not, ring 0800 689 0668 during the week and somebody will walk you through it, or hand it over any repair counter in the city for ten minutes with a screwdriver. Then post it tracked and insured to Oxford Data Recovery, John Eccles House, Oxford Science Park, Robert Robinson Avenue, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4GP. From Coventry that is about fifty-five miles of M40 and an hour of driving, with parking outside for anyone who would sooner deliver it by hand between 9:00am and 5:30pm on a weekday. Nobody collects, and there is no counter in Coventry, so the trip belongs to you either way. Slip a sheet in the box giving your name, a mobile number and what the machine was doing when it went wrong.
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.
Getting one clean read from a 2.5-inch disk that is nearly done
The repair menu that mended the boot and took the documents
Journals, LVM volumes, and dual-boot installs that overwrite one another
Apple's version of all this, from containers down to soldered storage
Looking at it costs nothing, one written figure follows, and the band governing this page is £300 + VAT for one hard disk or SSD, an NVMe blade counting as a single drive.