Free 48-hour diagnostic, one fixed price agreed in writing before anything is opened, and no fix no fee on most jobs. The city sits on the A10 with the cathedral visible from several miles out.
Roughly 25 minutes and 14 miles separate Ely from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Soham, Littleport, Witchford and the wider Cambridgeshire area.
Ely is fourteen miles north on the A10, about twenty-five minutes. Straight run, no motorway, and easy parking at our end.
Ely is a cathedral city working as a commuter town, with agriculture and food processing filling in behind it. The recovery work splits along the same line. From the city itself come household and professional jobs — photographs, accounts, the drives of people who work in Cambridge and live somewhere quieter. From the fen edge around it come farm office machines and the industrial ones: weighbridge PCs, grain store controllers, irrigation and packhouse systems running on drives that have sat in a damp outbuilding for a decade.
The city sits on the A10 with the cathedral visible from several miles out. Lancaster Way Business Park on the western edge and the industrial ground toward Queen Adelaide account for most of the commercial work we see from here.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Two distinct streams. Domestic and small-professional work out of the city, and agricultural equipment from the surrounding fen — farm accounts machines, packhouse and grain-store controllers, and CCTV recorders from yards. The second group tends to arrive filthy and running an operating system that stopped being supported some years ago.
Before you do anything else. If the drive came out of farm or packhouse equipment, leave it in whatever it arrived in and do not attempt to clean it. Contamination is a great deal easier to deal with in a clean-air cabinet than after somebody has wiped it.
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 Ely 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 Ely. 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 Ely.
It costs us the job. It is still the right answer, and you would rather hear it now.
The drive still mounts and reads. Copy the files off yourself, most important first, then stop using it. A laboratory adds nothing to a disk you can already read.
It is on a University or institutional system. Departmental and college machines are frequently backed up centrally without the user knowing. One email to whoever administers it resolves more of these than any technical work we could do.
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. We will tell you which tools are worth trying.
Your BitLocker key exists after all. On a work or institutional machine it is almost certainly held centrally in Azure AD or Intune. Ask before you assume it is gone.
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. We’re about fourteen miles away via the A10, roughly 25 minutes. 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.