Free 48-hour diagnostic, one fixed price agreed in writing before anything is opened, and no fix no fee on most jobs. The most easterly town in Britain, moved from fishing to offshore energy, with the wind farm operations and maintenance base and its supporting engineering firms concentrated around the port.
Roughly 110 minutes and 85 miles separate Lowestoft from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Oulton Broad, Kessingland, Beccles and the wider Suffolk area.
Eighty-five miles north-east and the furthest point we cover. Insured post is the practical route from here and return shipping is free.
Lowestoft has moved from fishing to offshore energy without much of a gap, and the recovery work has moved with it. Survey and inspection data from wind farm operations, vessel and marine systems, and the engineering firms servicing both make up the technical end. Salt air and marine environments do measurable damage to storage over time, and drives arriving from the coast show corrosion at a rate we do not see inland — connector and board corrosion in particular, on media that has never been physically dropped.
The most easterly town in Britain, moved from fishing to offshore energy, with the wind farm operations and maintenance base and its supporting engineering firms concentrated around the port.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Offshore and marine. Survey, inspection and ROV data from the wind farms, vessel navigation and monitoring systems, and engineering records from the servicing firms. Corrosion damage from salt air is a genuine and distinguishing feature of coastal media.
Before you do anything else. On anything that has lived near the sea, do not power it up to test. Salt corrosion on a board is workable until current goes through 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 Lowestoft 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 Lowestoft. 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 Lowestoft.
None of these earn us anything. They are here because all four come up by phone most weeks.
The drive still mounts and reads. Copy it off now, most important files first, and stop using the disk. There is nothing a clean-air bench adds to a drive you can still open.
The system is still running on a mirror. On a degraded RAID 1 or 5 the data is usually still live. Take a copy off it before you do anything else — that is a considerably cheaper afternoon than a recovery.
A recent deletion from a healthy drive. Read-only software installed to a different drive often handles this for a fraction of our fee, provided the disk itself is sound.
There is an older copy you have forgotten. An external from two years ago, a laptop that was replaced, a copy sent to an accountant. A meaningful share of enquiries end here, in five minutes, for nothing.
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 eighty-five miles away via the A11 and A146, roughly 110 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.