Free 48-hour diagnostic, one fixed price agreed in writing before anything is opened, and no fix no fee on most jobs. The guided busway runs from St Ives directly past our door, which makes this the easiest town on the list to reach without a car.
Roughly 18 minutes and 9 miles separate St Ives from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Needingworth, Houghton, Hemingford Grey and the wider Cambridgeshire area.
Nine miles west along the A14, or the guided busway end to end if the road is bad. Under twenty minutes either way — the closest of the market towns to us.
St Ives is a market town that became a Cambridge dormitory when the busway opened, and its business base is small and light: professional services, trades, a few distribution units on the edge of town. What that produces for us is a high proportion of one-machine businesses — the sole practitioner whose accounts, correspondence and client files all live on one laptop with no server behind it. Those are urgent jobs by definition, because there is no second copy anywhere in the organisation.
The guided busway runs from St Ives directly past our door, which makes this the easiest town on the list to reach without a car. The industrial ground at Compass Point and along the Somersham road sends most of the commercial work.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Small-business single points of failure. Accountants, surveyors, letting agents and trades running everything from one machine, plus the household work a commuter town generates. Recovery is usually quick because the media is modern; the pressure comes from there being no fallback at all.
Before you do anything else. If it is the only machine in the business, stop working on it entirely. A sole-trader laptop that is still being used while somebody decides what to do is a laptop actively overwriting the thing you want back.
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 St Ives 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 St Ives. 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 St Ives.
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 nine miles away via the A14 and the busway, roughly 18 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.