Bedworth sits on the A444 in the gap between Nuneaton and Coventry, close enough to both to be mistaken for a suburb and stubbornly neither. It was a pit town, and the Miners' Welfare park and the November parade are still what the place measures itself by. Most of what comes to the bench from CV12 is domestic or one-person business: a single computer, one external drive beside it, and nothing anywhere else.
Nothing is charged for examining anything posted from Bedworth. 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.
The most common parcel out of Bedworth is a portable USB drive that has been knocked off a desk. Modern portable drives park their heads when they sense a fall, which works about as well as you would expect halfway through a file copy, and what usually follows is a drive that spins up, sounds slightly wrong and never appears. It is worth knowing that a drive in this state is not repaired and returned working — it is imaged onto healthy media and the files are lifted off the copy, so the fact it will never work again afterwards is beside the point.
Photographs are what people actually ring about. Fifteen or twenty years of them on one disk, no cloud account, no second drive, and a laptop that was reinstalled at some point without anybody checking what was on it first. There is more room for hope there than most people expect: deleting a file on a mechanical hard drive removes the pointer to it rather than the contents, and a reinstall writes over a fraction of the surface rather than all of it. Any single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT, and a memory card, USB stick or pen drive is £250 + VAT. Nothing is charged for finding out where you stand.
Solid-state drives are the honest exception to all that. An SSD in a modern machine runs TRIM, which tells the drive which blocks the file system has released so that it can clear them ready for reuse, and it generally does the clearing within minutes. Deleted files on a working SSD are frequently gone in a way no laboratory reaches, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. A failed SSD is a different matter, and often a much better one: if the controller has died with the cells intact, there is real work to be done at £300 + VAT.
The small-business end of town is the sheds and units around Bayton Road and Exhall, and the sole traders working out of a van with a laptop on the passenger seat. Plumbers, electrical contractors, a couple of hundred one-person limited companies. The pattern is always the same: quotes, job photographs, certificates and the accounts in one place, plus a memory stick that gets used as a filing cabinet until the day it is not recognised. Sticks are the cheapest band at £250 + VAT and among the most frequently rescued items on the bench.
Nobody comes out to collect, and there is nowhere local to hand a drive over — not on the Bedworth side of the A444, not in the city. Everything is worked at Oxford Data Recovery on the Oxford Science Park, about sixty miles away down the M40, and it gets there in one of three ways: Special Delivery, which is tracked and insured; a courier you book yourself, treated exactly the same at this end; or in your own hands at that reception, Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm. Take the disk out of the laptop or tower and send the disk on its own. An external drive is the exception and stays sealed in its case. Leave the mains adaptor, the caddy and the leads at home.
The bands are published and fixed. £250 + VAT covers a card, a stick or a pen drive; £300 + VAT covers any hard drive or SSD; £400 + VAT covers an encrypted disk or one lifted out of a CCTV recorder; arrays, NAS boxes and servers start at £500 + VAT and rise with the member count; £800 + VAT covers a full forensic investigation with its written report. The free diagnostic finishes two working days after booking-in, and single drives are usually done two to four working days after the quote is approved. Logical work is no fix, no fee — the exclusions are mechanical and electronic failure, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs — and physical work takes 50% up front. Ring 0800 689 0668 free of charge, Mon to Fri.
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.