The family tower that has held every photo since 2010, the workstation with the company books, the all-in-one in the hallway — when a desktop gives up, the drive inside usually hasn't. Unscrew it, post it from anywhere around Swansea Bay, and we'll take it from there.
Free diagnostic on every desktop computer job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
Every desktop computer job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these fifteen cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
A failing disk or corrupted system files; the documents extract regardless.
Mechanical failure in progress — stop the reboots now.
Drive electronics burn along with the power supply; PCB and ROM work brings the data back.
Dropped off the bus through firmware, electronics or connection failure.
The old data mostly survives beneath a fresh Windows — until the machine keeps being used.
Shift-Delete included — recoverable until the space is reused.
Bad sectors freeze the whole PC; hardware imagers read around the rot.
Infected desktops are imaged and picked clean on the isolated ransomware bench.
Striped desktop pairs double the failure surface; both members image before any rebuild maths.
Retired towers with PATA and SCSI disks — the legacy adapters never left the shelf.
ST1000DM010 / ST2000DM008 drives are the commonest clickers in family towers.
WD10EZEX boards cook in storms; matched donor PCBs with ROM transfer sort them.
AIO machines hide laptop internals behind the screen — trickier to open, identical to recover.
OptiPlex and EliteDesk drives shelved for years spin reluctantly — imaged gently, motor faults expected.
Wrong modular PSU leads and static during builds kill drives young; electronics repair follows.
Desktops are the easy ones to prepare: two screws, two cables, and the drive is in your hand ready to post — the recovery then runs like any HDD or SSD case. All-in-one machines are laptops standing upright and can be trickier to open; call first if yours is sealed. Workstations running paired drives or motherboard RAID need one extra step — tell us the configuration and which port each drive used, so the set is imaged and reassembled in the right order.
A repair shop 'fixes' a slow PC with a factory reset, and the documents folder goes down with it — we hear that story from Swansea weekly. The reinstall only overwrites part of the disk; beneath the new Windows, most of the old data survives in the regions it never touched. Every further boot chips away at what's left, so shut the machine down now and send the drive.
Everything the drive lab owns applies to a desktop's disk, and the legacy shelf covers the older towers:
Firmware-level access for whatever drive was in the tower, whatever its age or interface.
Unstable desktop drives are captured sector by sector under hardware retry control.
Clicking tower drives get donor head swaps under filtered air, parts matched from stock.
IDE/PATA, SCSI and early SATA — two decades of retired family PCs stay readable here.
Your drive is fully imaged on hardware imagers first; recovery always runs on the copy, never the tired original.
Originals are read-only from the moment they're logged in — no exceptions.
Office fleets, gaming builds and the tower under the stairs that's held everything for a decade — most spin a Barracuda ST2000DM008 or a WD Blue WD10EZEX, and those two account for a healthy share of the clicking and surge cases in this lab. All-in-ones count as desktops here too, even though a laptop is hiding behind the glass.
The iMedia tower was Britain's default family PC for the best part of a decade, and its disks arrive here either still bolted into a machine that gave up starting, or loose from a drawer where somebody kept them 'just in case' after the tower was scrapped. The classic self-inflicted wound is a factory restore run to cure slowness, burying years of photos beneath a fresh Windows — they generally survive down there and lift cleanly from a full sector image. Elderly IDE and first-generation SATA mechanics are connected through the legacy shelf and imaged at the gentle pace their age requires.
Pavilions from home offices and OptiPlex and EliteDesk machines from business fleets keep this bench in steady work. Office decommissions repeat a pattern of their own: a drive boxed up in a clear-out, wanted again years later for the accounts or CAD files on it, and now unwilling to spin after so long stood idle. Home towers tend to come in after a storm has taken PSU and drive board in one strike, or once Windows refuses to get past its logo because the disk beneath is littered with bad sectors. Post the bare drive and the bench does the rest: imaged first, repaired where needed, data handed back on new media.
The drive needs to be removed from your computer before you send it in to us. Unsure? Phone us on 0800 689 0668, or a local PC repair shop will remove it for a small fee.
Open the side of the tower, undo the two mounting screws, unplug the SATA and power leads, and post the bare drive — we don't extract drives at this end. Your postage stays cheap, the tower stays home, and the drive travels safer without the case around it.
Most customers post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Bristol Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.