Free 48-hour diagnostic, one fixed price agreed in writing before anything is opened, and no fix no fee on most jobs. More national distribution centres and corporate back-offices per square mile than anywhere else in the region, spread across the grid from Bletchley up to Wolverton.
Roughly 60 minutes and 50 miles separate Milton Keynes from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Bletchley, Newport Pagnell, Wolverton and the wider Buckinghamshire area.
Fifty miles west via the A428 and A421, about an hour. Insured post covers it and return shipping is free.
Milton Keynes has more national distribution centres and corporate back-offices per square mile than anywhere else in the region, which makes it the most enterprise-shaped catchment we cover. The work is large arrays and virtualised infrastructure: warehouse management systems, corporate file and application servers, and VM hosts where a single failure takes out several logical machines at once. These are the jobs where the reconstruction takes longer than the imaging.
More national distribution centres and corporate back-offices per square mile than anywhere else in the region, spread across the grid from Bletchley up to Wolverton.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Enterprise storage. Large RAID sets, SAN volumes and virtual machine hosts out of distribution and corporate back-office operations. Array reconstruction — working out the parameters of a set whose controller is dead and whose documentation was never written — is the bulk of the effort on these.
Before you do anything else. On a virtual host, do not delete snapshots to free space. It is the most common instinct and the most expensive one.
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 Milton Keynes 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 Milton Keynes. 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 Milton Keynes.
None of these help us sell anything. All four come up most weeks, and hearing the answer early saves a wasted journey.
The drive still mounts and reads. Copy it off this afternoon, most important first, then stop using it. A laboratory adds nothing to a disk you can already open.
It is a virtual machine and the base disk is intact. Snapshot problems often look like total loss and are not. Before assuming the worst, check whether the base VMDK or VHDX is readable — frequently it is.
A recent deletion from a healthy drive. Read-only software installed to a different drive will often handle it, and we will tell you which tools are worth your time.
Your BitLocker key is with IT. On a corporate machine it is almost certainly 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. We’re about fifty miles away via the A428 and A421, roughly 60 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.