Screens, motherboards, keyboards and Windows installations can all fail without any contact with the disk. In the case where the disk can simply be removed from its housing, the condition of surrounding hardware ceases to have any relevance. A laptop which won't start generally results in an inexpensive recovery option rather than an expensive recovery option. If this machine needs to return to operation afterwards, please advise us during the diagnostic stage; when dealing with instrument and control PCs, we can return the recovery as a bootable clone of the original PC instead of a collection of individual files.
This is what's most useful to know here, because it changes how much recovery costs.
Screens break, keyboards stop working, the power circuit for charging fails, motherboards fail and Windows installs corrupt themselves, and in each case the drive has usually been left unharmed. Laptops that refuse to start very often have an intact drive installed.
Where storage lifts out, the state of the machine it was inside no longer matters. That makes a dead laptop one of the cheaper recoveries we do, and it is worth finding out before you write off the machine or hand it to a repair shop that will just overwrite everything.
Most Windows laptops are using a removable M.2 module or a 2.5-inch hard disk. Some slimline versions have flash memory soldered onto the mainboard which cannot be removed, and therefore we cannot recover it. We do not support the removal/recovery of non-removable flash units from the computer.
Modern Windows has enabled automatic encryption for many devices. If you don’t have the recovery key you will not be able to read the data stored on the unit regardless of its health status, and the first step is establishing this recovery key.
The key for BitLocker is almost always stored either in Azure AD or Intune on a company device, and often in the user's Microsoft account when it is a consumer device. One single question solves more of the above problems than all of the technical troubleshooting you can do.
Most labs don’t often encounter this type of unit, and this location receives them every week.
Along with standard laptops for students and general administrative use, this area also sends us something unusual: control and data collection PCs that are directly connected to laboratory equipment (microscopes; spectrometry and sequencing instrumentation; chromatographic systems; various forms of environmental monitoring and testing platforms). The software for these types of lab equipment cannot be installed onto any current hardware, and their vendors stopped providing support years ago. The instrument itself is worth six figures, while the PC driving it cost four hundred pounds in 2009.
These are recoverable and usually are fairly straightforward; however, they require special treatment. When a machine needs to be returned to operation, we can provide the recovery as a bootable image of the original drive on newer media (which is generally what the lab really requires) instead of providing the recovery as a file folder. Let us know at the diagnostic.
Laptop and desktop recovery is priced from £300 +VAT for a single drive, regardless of the make or what other issues exist with the machine. The only exception is when the storage has been soldered onto the motherboard. We do not recover drives which are not removable.
Please send us just the drive: we cannot take a full laptop or PC. Any computer shop will extract the drive from your laptop/PC within a few minutes should you wish someone to perform this service for you.
Yes, almost certainly. And usually cheaply. On most Windows laptops the drive is simply lifted out. At this point the condition/state of the remainder of the machine is completely irrelevant. Please send the drive alone (any computer shop will remove it from your laptop/PC in minutes should you wish them to do so).
Not if the data is important to you. Startup repair, chkdsk and reset will all write to the drive and, on a physically failing disk, convert an otherwise recoverable job into a partial one. Have it diagnosed before running anything.
Do not assume it's gone; ask first. On work machines it almost always exists in Azure AD or Intune and your IT team can retrieve it. On personal machines check the Microsoft account that was used to set up the machine. Without the key there is no path for us to take.
Stop using it and do not charge it. Liquid damage spreads through corrosion for days. If your hard drive is removable, the liquid will rarely affect your data. The urgency lies with the board of the computer, not the hard drive.
No, and it is worth saying because many people give up on computers based upon issues that are unrelated to their hard drives. A broken display screen has no bearing on the drive, and as long as your computer starts up there is virtually no chance of any loss of data.
Only if you ask. For 14 days from delivery we keep your original media in case something was missed and then securely wipe the media unless you ask us to return it to you or request earlier destruction.
£300 +VAT per drive. A non-working laptop is typically a board failure which leaves an entirely functional hard disk intact. However, check whether device encryption was ever enabled prior to someone attempting to disassemble the unit, since the key resides on the failed board.