Screens, motherboards, keyboards and Windows installations all fail without ever touching the disk. Where the drive lifts out, the state of the machine around it stops mattering, and a laptop that will not start is usually a cheap recovery rather than an expensive one. Tell us at the diagnostic if the machine has to go back into service afterwards — on instrument and control PCs we can return the recovery as a bootable clone rather than a folder of files.
$ cdr diagnose /dev/nvme0 → Device: Dell XPS 13 · 512GB NVMe → Status: WILL NOT POWER ON — board fault → Client: confidential · Cambridge, Cambridgeshire $ cdr engineer-working → Drive: removed · healthy → Imaging: 480 GB / 512 GB · 100% read → NTFS: rebuilt · files intact $ cdr verify → ✓ documents — 28,400 files → ✓ photos — 19,100 files → ✓ laptop recovered — data back
The single most useful thing to understand here, because it changes what a recovery costs.
Screens crack, keyboards fail, charging circuits burn out, motherboards die and Windows installations corrupt themselves — and in every one of those cases the storage is usually untouched. A laptop that will not turn on is very often a laptop with a perfectly good drive inside it.
Where the storage lifts out, the condition of the machine around it stops mattering entirely. That makes a dead laptop one of the cheaper recoveries we do, and it is worth establishing before anyone writes off the machine or hands it to a repair shop that will reinstall over the top of everything.
Most Windows laptops still use a removable M.2 module or a 2.5-inch drive. Some thin-and-light models solder the flash directly to the board, which makes reads chip-level work rather than a simple removal.
Modern Windows enables device encryption automatically on many machines. Without the recovery key the drive is unreadable no matter how healthy it is, and that key is the first thing to establish.
On a work machine the BitLocker key is almost certainly held centrally in Azure AD or Intune. On a personal machine it is often in the Microsoft account it was set up with. One question resolves more of these than any technical work.
A category most laboratories rarely see and this one sees weekly.
Alongside the ordinary run of student and office laptops, this catchment sends something unusual: control and acquisition PCs attached to laboratory instruments. Microscopes, spectrometers, sequencers, chromatography rigs, environmental monitoring and test benches — machines whose software will not install on anything current and whose vendor stopped supporting them years ago. The instrument is worth six figures and the PC driving it cost four hundred pounds in 2009.
These are recoverable and usually straightforward, but they need handling differently. Where the machine has to go back into service we can return the recovery as a bootable clone on modern media rather than as a folder of files, which is generally what the laboratory actually needs. Say so at the diagnostic.
Laptop and desktop recovery is from £300 +VAT for a single drive, whichever make the machine is and whatever else is wrong with it. Machines with soldered storage requiring chip-level work are quoted at the same class after diagnostic.
Send the bare drive if you are confident removing it, or the whole machine if not. We would rather have the machine than a drive damaged on the way out of it.
Almost certainly, and usually cheaply. On most Windows laptops the storage lifts out, at which point the state of the machine is irrelevant. Send the whole laptop if you would rather not open it.
Not if the data matters. Startup repair, chkdsk and reset all write to the drive, and on a physically failing disk that converts a recoverable job into a partial one. Get it diagnosed before running anything.
Ask before assuming it is gone. On a work machine it is nearly always in Azure AD or Intune and your IT team can retrieve it. On a personal machine, check the Microsoft account the laptop was set up with. Without the key there is no route in.
Stop using it and do not charge it. Liquid damage spreads by corrosion over days. If the storage is removable this rarely affects the data at all; the urgency is about the board, not the drive.
No, and it is worth saying because people write machines off over it. A broken screen has no bearing on the storage. If the machine still powers on, the data is almost certainly fine.
Only if you ask. Your original media is held for 14 days after delivery in case anything was missed, then securely wiped unless you have asked for it back or asked us to destroy it sooner.
£300 +VAT per machine. A laptop that will not start is usually a board fault with an entirely healthy disk beside it — but check whether device encryption was ever switched on before anyone takes it apart, because the key lives on the board that died.