Atherstone is a Watling Street town. The Romans put the road there, the hatters made felt on it for the better part of two centuries, and the ball game still goes through the same street every Shrove Tuesday. What surrounds it is farmland and small villages, and what runs past it now is the A5 with distribution sheds along it. Media reaching the bench from CV9 is usually older than average, has worked harder than average, and is the only copy of whatever it holds.
Nothing is charged for examining anything posted from Atherstone. The written figure comes first and the work comes after it: £300 + VAT one disk or SSD, £250 + VAT a card or a stick, from £500 + VAT an array.
Start with the sheds on the A5, because they send the most urgent work. Transport and distribution operations run job files, delivery records, telematics exports and yard cameras, and they run them on hardware that was bought to be adequate rather than resilient. When the office machine or the small server stops, invoicing stops, and a haulier that cannot invoice for a fortnight has a bigger problem than a lost folder. Any single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT; several disks in one box start at £500 + VAT and go up with the member count. Urgent work is flagged on arrival and moved to the front of the bench queue at no extra charge.
Out towards Mancetter, Grendon and Baddesley the offices are in converted buildings that were not built to house computers. Cold in January, damp through most of the winter, and on an electricity supply that dips whenever something substantial starts up in the yard. Herd and field records, movement paperwork, subsidy claims and the accounts all sit on one desktop that has stood in that corner since long before the broadband was worth having, which is also why the online backup nobody set up would not have worked anyway. When one of those drives finally stops, age is usually the honest diagnosis rather than anything the owner did wrong.
A mechanical drive is a stack of spinning platters with heads flying a fraction of a hair's width above them, and after ten years of duty something in that arrangement gives. If it has begun to click at intervals, the heads are failing to read and being reset, and each retry drags them back across the surface an image would have to be taken from. If it grinds or whirrs and stops, the motor or the bearings are involved. Either way the answer is the same: switch it off and leave it off. Do not keep power-cycling it to see whether it comes back this time, do not run repair software at it and do not put it in the freezer. Mechanical failure is one of the published exclusions from no fix, no fee, along with electronic failure, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs, so this work takes 50% up front with the balance due only if the files come back — and the free examination tells you the realistic odds first.
Shops along Long Street, the pubs, the yards and the small workshops keep the recorder that everybody eventually needs footage from. Take the drive out of the box rather than posting the box, and unplug the unit as soon as you know an incident matters, because a recorder that stays running is busy writing over the very week you want. Recorder drives are £400 + VAT and use proprietary layouts rather than anything a PC would mount, which is most of the work in them.
Households in the town send the usual: a laptop that will not start with the photographs on it, an external drive that has been dropped, a memory stick holding something nobody thought was important until it was. Cards and sticks are £250 + VAT. External drives stay sealed in their own cases. Laptop and desktop drives come out and travel on their own, which takes a screwdriver and a few minutes, and if the machine is one of the newer sorts with its storage soldered to the mainboard there is nothing to remove and nothing that can be done.
Atherstone is the furthest of these towns from the laboratory. Oxford Data Recovery is on the Oxford Science Park at Littlemore, which is around seventy-five miles away by the M42 and the M40, comfortably an hour and a half. That is a long way to drive when tracked, insured post will do it overnight for a few pounds, though the reception does take devices by hand Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm if somebody happens to be going that way. There is no counter in Atherstone, none in Coventry, and nobody collects. Pack the drive so nothing can move inside the box, leave the leads and the power supply at home, and put a note in with your name and a number that gets answered.
Costs, once and plainly: £250 + VAT a memory card, USB stick or pen drive; £300 + VAT any single hard drive or SSD; £400 + VAT an encrypted disk or a CCTV recorder drive; from £500 + VAT for RAID, NAS or server work depending on the member count; £800 + VAT for a forensic investigation delivered with a full written report. The examination is free, it takes two working days from the moment the parcel is logged, and it ends in a single written figure that does not change afterwards. A single drive is usually recovered within two to four working days of approval. Logical faults carry no fix, no fee. Freephone 0800 689 0668, Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm.
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.
Looking is free, one disk or SSD is £300 + VAT, and a card or a stick is £250 + VAT.