Free 48-hour diagnostic, one fixed price agreed in writing before anything is opened, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Three distinct economies in one county: the research and technology cluster in the south, logistics and light manufacturing along the A14, and fenland agriculture and food processing to the north.
The lab sits at Vision Park on the northern edge of Cambridge, at the A14 junction. Nowhere in the county is more than an hour away.
Covering Cambridge, Ely, Huntingdon and the rest of the county.
The lab sits at Vision Park on the northern edge of Cambridge, at the A14 junction. Nowhere in the county is more than an hour away.
Cambridgeshire splits into three economies and sends us three different kinds of work. The south is research and technology — single-copy academic and startup data, instrument PCs, science park arrays. The centre and west are logistics and light manufacturing along the A14, which produces business array work and genuine emergencies. The north is fenland agriculture and food processing, which produces industrial media in poor physical condition. One county, three quite different benches.
Three distinct economies in one county: the research and technology cluster in the south, logistics and light manufacturing along the A14, and fenland agriculture and food processing to the north.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Everything from doctoral research on a single USB stick to RAID 6 sets out of A14 distribution warehouses and packhouse controllers from the fens. The county's three economies produce three distinct job profiles, and the fenland work is consistently the most physically damaged.
Before you do anything else. What to do first depends on what failed, but the one universal rule is to stop using it. Everything else we can work with.
Alongside that there is the ordinary run of household work that every area produces: laptops that stopped starting, external drives full of photographs, camera cards formatted by mistake. Those are from £250 to £300 +VAT and are frequently the quickest jobs we handle. Business and array work from Cambridgeshire and across Cambridgeshire starts from £500 +VAT.
The same whether you walk it in or send it by courier.
Compass House, Vision Park, Cambridge CB24 9AD, Monday to Friday 9am to 5:30pm — or insured post from Cambridgeshire. Send the bare drive rather than the whole machine where you can.
The fault is classified — mechanical, electronic, firmware or logical — because that decides the route, the price and the realistic odds.
One figure, agreed before anything is touched, and it does not move afterwards. If software would do it, or nothing can be recovered, you hear that instead.
Imaged read-only, rebuilt from the copy, verified by opening files rather than counting them, and returned on fresh media with free shipping back to Cambridgeshire.
It costs us the job. It remains the right answer, and every one of these comes up by phone most weeks.
The drive still mounts and reads. Copy your files off yourself, most important first, then stop using the disk. There is nothing a laboratory adds to a drive you can still read.
The files are in a backup you forgot about. Cloud version history, Time Machine, Previous Versions, a copy emailed to somebody. A meaningful share of enquiries end here, in five minutes, for nothing.
A recent deletion from a healthy drive. Reputable read-only software installed to a different drive will often do it for a fraction of our fee.
Your BitLocker key exists after all. On a work machine it is almost certainly held by IT in Azure AD or Intune. One question resolves more of these than any technical work we do.
Send the device over with a short account of what happened to it. The diagnostic costs nothing and commits you to nothing, and the figure that follows is fixed in writing before anything is opened.
Nothing can begin until the device is on the bench, which makes this the only step that needs anything from you. Pack it properly, put your details in with it, and send it over. What follows is a free diagnostic and a written figure, in that order.
Posting it? Use something tracked and insured — whatever is on the drive is worth considerably more than the postage. Bringing it in? Weekdays, 9am to 5:30pm, and it still wants packing as above for the journey.
Tell us what the device is, what it is doing, and anything already tried — an engineer will come back with a realistic view of the odds and a price band, before you commit to posting anything.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 01223 655015.
Compass House, Vision Park, Cambridge CB24 9AD, Monday to Friday 9am to 5:30pm. Free return shipping either way. Or post it insured — return shipping is free either way.
We can give you the band immediately — the published prices start at £250 plus VAT for cards and £300 for a single drive. The exact figure is fixed in writing after the free 48-hour diagnostic, and it does not move afterwards.
Switch it off and leave it off. Clicking means the heads cannot find their servo data, and every further power-on risks scoring the surface. How long it ran after the first noise affects the result more than anything we do.
Regularly. NDAs signed as standard, one named contact from diagnostic to delivery, invoicing rather than card payment for established firms, and a written account of what failed for insurers or auditors.
From £250 plus VAT for cards and USB media, from £300 plus VAT for a single drive, laptop or Mac with removable storage, £550 plus VAT flat for a Fusion Drive, and from £500 plus VAT for RAID, NAS and servers — each quoted in writing after a free 48-hour diagnostic.
Occasionally, on a logical fault with healthy hardware dropped in early. Physical recoveries cannot be compressed that far — priority handling moves you to the front of the queue but cannot make a failing drive read faster.
The diagnostic costs nothing, most jobs carry no fee unless the data comes back, and the bench is 11 miles away rather than at the end of a courier chain. Walk it in, or send it insured — both start the same way.