Free 48-hour diagnostic, one fixed price agreed in writing before anything is opened, and no fix no fee on most jobs. A manufacturing town surrounded by forest, with food processing, print and engineering on its estates and a large agricultural hinterland on both the Norfolk and Suffolk sides.
Roughly 45 minutes and 30 miles separate Thetford from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Brandon, Watton, Attleborough and the wider Norfolk area.
Thirty miles north-east on the A11, about forty-five minutes. Dual carriageway most of the way since the Elveden upgrade.
Thetford is a manufacturing town in the middle of a forest, with food processing, print and engineering on its estates and a large agricultural hinterland either side. The work divides between factory systems and farm systems, and both tend to arrive late — this is a catchment where a failing drive is often lived with for months because the machine still mostly works, which means the media that reaches us has usually degraded a good deal further than it needed to.
A manufacturing town surrounded by forest, with food processing, print and engineering on its estates and a large agricultural hinterland on both the Norfolk and Suffolk sides.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Production and agricultural systems in an advanced state of failure. Process controllers, print and pre-press archives, farm management and machinery data. Late presentation is the theme; drives arrive with substantially more bad sectors than the original fault would have caused.
Before you do anything else. If it has been making a noise for weeks, stop now. The single most common thing we see from this catchment is a drive that was lived with far too long.
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 Thetford 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 Thetford. 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 Thetford.
The distance from here makes a wasted postal round trip worse than usual, so these are worth checking first.
The drive still mounts and reads. Copy the files off before you pack anything. A disk you can read does not need a laboratory, and posting it here would be a week wasted.
The files are in a backup you forgot about. Cloud version history, Time Machine, Previous Versions, a copy emailed to somebody. Check all four before you post anything at this distance.
The media is old but undamaged. Obsolete does not mean broken. Sometimes the answer is a reader rather than a recovery, and we will say so on the phone rather than after you have sent it.
Your BitLocker or FileVault key exists. On a work machine it is almost certainly held centrally. One question to your IT contact 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 thirty miles away via the A11, roughly 45 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.