The family tower which holds every picture taken since 2010; the work station for keeping the company's records; the all-in-one located in the hallway: when a desktop computer gives up, the drive is usually still good. Remove the drive, obtain a quote, and then you can either post it to us from anywhere around Swansea Bay or drop it off at our Bristol laboratory (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, no appointment needed) and we will take care of everything.
Free diagnosis for all desktop PC jobs. One single fixed quotation (in writing) is provided prior to commencing work on each desktop computer job.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. This is true of all our services except for failure of electrical/mechanical components, chip level repairs, DVRs and forensic analysis. Our full price list can be seen at the cost of data recovery page.
When troubleshooting a desktop computer we always try to find out how well the symptoms match up with known failures. These 15 cover almost everything which comes into the lab for recovery.
Windows won't load because the hard drive is either failing or there has been corruption of the Windows system files. The documents can be extracted regardless of whether it was a bad disk or bad system files.
You have mechanical failure happening right now: do not continue to reboot this machine.
The drive electronics inside of a desktop computer burn up along with its power supply. PCB and ROM work will bring back your data.
The drive dropped out of the BIOS due to a firmware or electronic problem with the drive itself, and/or a cable issue that caused it to stop receiving signals.
Most of the old files remain under the new Windows (for a time) and continue to exist unless someone keeps using the computer.
Even when you use "Shift-Delete" to delete something, it does not disappear forever until some other file has occupied its space.
A bad sector freezes your entire PC; hardware imagers can "read around the bad sector".
All the drives from infected machines are cloned and picked clean on an isolated "ransomware bench."
Two drives in a striped desktop configuration create twice as much of an opportunity for failures to occur. Both hard drives will have to be imaged prior to the array being rebuilt.
Older towers still contain PATA and SCSI type hard disk drives. The old adapters for these never left the shelf.
The most common clicking hard drive that occurs in home computers is the Barracuda ST1000DM010 / ST2000DM008 drive.
WD10EZEX boards will get cooked during a storm. Using matched donor PCBs with ROM transferred to them is the way to sort them out.
All-in-one computers are essentially laptops that conceal their internal components within the screen. They can be harder to disassemble, but when it comes time to recover data from them, the process is identical.
Years old OptiPlex and EliteDesk hard drives come off their shelves and spin reluctantly, so each is gently imaged with all expectations that there will be some motor issues.
DIY build errors from wrong modular PSU leads and static on builds can destroy the hard drive while it is still young; after that, electronics repairs will follow.
Desktops are probably easier than all other computers for preparation: two screws, two cables, and the drive is literally in your hands, ready to post as soon as you receive a quote, and after that it works just like with every other HDD/SSD case. All-in-one machines (like laptops on their side) can sometimes be harder to get into than regular desktops, so call us before attempting to take apart any of these types if they are completely closed/sealed. Workstations using paired drives or motherboard RAID will require an additional step: let us know what configuration was being used with the drives, and which ports were used by each drive so we can properly image the original drives, and put them back together in the correct order.
A repair shop 'fixes' a slow PC using a factory reset, and when the user logs back into their account all of their documents folder files are gone. We have heard this story from Swansea weekly. All that is done by the reinstall is to overwrite some of the area on the hard disk. Beneath the new Windows operating system, most of the original file information remains intact in the areas the reinstall never touched. Each time you start up your computer after the reset, you lose additional portions of that old data, so shut your computer down immediately, contact us for a quote and send us the drive.
All of what the drive lab has is used when working on an individual desktop disk drive regardless of how long ago it was purchased, whether it uses older interfaces or newer ones, and the older towers have the legacy shelf covering them:
Drive firmware level access to whatever drive was installed into the desktop tower, whatever time period it was purchased in and whatever its interface.
Sector by sector capture of unstable desktop drives via the use of hardware retry controlled DeepSpar imaging units.
The head-swap bench has a donor library that provides a way to swap in donor heads on the clicking tower drives. Stock parts are used to match the donor head to the drive.
Legacy interface adapters can be used to connect IDE / PATA, SCSI, and early SATA devices to this system, so two decades of retired family PCs remain readable using these adapters.
Sector by sector imaging is performed so there is a full image of your drive on one of our hardware imagers before we attempt to recover data from it. Recovery will occur from the copy and not the original drive (so as not to put further wear on your original).
Hardware write blockers prevent modification to the original drive once it's been logged into the system. There are no exceptions.
Office fleet, gaming build, the tower under the stairs that held everything for a decade: most have used either a Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM008 or a WD Blue WD10EZEX. Those two are the common denominator behind a healthy percentage of the clicking and surge cases in this lab. All-in-ones are counted as desktops here as well, even though there is really a laptop hiding behind the glass.
The iMedia tower was Britain's default family PC for nearly ten years, and these disks have arrived on site because they were removed from an iMedia tower which would no longer boot; or had been extracted from a "just in case" drawer by someone who scrapped the tower. The most common form of the "self-inflicted" damage is when someone has performed a factory restore in order to speed up their iMedia as it had become slow, burying years of photos. They normally remain buried, but intact, under this new install of Windows, and therefore are able to be lifted off cleanly with a full sector disk image. We connect the older IDE and first generation SATA mechanisms via our legacy shelf. Since they are old we image them at the gentle speed which is needed based upon their age.
Home office Pavilions, and business fleets of OptiPlex and EliteDesk computers keep this bench consistently busy. The office decommissioning process is also repetitive; a hard drive boxed up as part of a clear-out, but then sought out many years later to retrieve your old accounts files or CAD files which are still stored on that very same hard drive, and unfortunately won't spin due to having sat idle for such a long time. Home towers normally arrive at the bench after a storm knocked down both the power supply unit (PSU) and the drive board in one strike, or when Windows will not pass beyond its logo screen, due to excessive bad sector problems on the original storage device. Once you've obtained a quote, post the bare hard drive to us, we'll do the rest: image the original hard drive first, repair if necessary, and provide you with all of your recovered data on newly purchased media.
You get a quote first; then you have to pull the drive out of your PC before sending it to us. Not sure? Call us on 0800 689 0668 or visit a local PC repair shop that can do this job for a small fee.
Open up the side of the tower to access it. Remove the two mounting screws from the drive. Unplug both the SATA and power leads from the drive. Once you have your quote, send us the bare drive (we don't extract drives at our facility). That way your postage will remain cheap, the tower stays home with you and the drive is more safe as it travels without being in the case.
First get a quote over the telephone or use our free on-line diagnostic. The majority of customers then have their media sent to us via post, this is tracked and insured.
Do you want to send a drive from your computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please do not send the complete unit of computer or device with a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD) inside. Please remove it and only send the drive itself. For a server, please remove all disks and label them by their bay. We will also not perform removal of internal drives from devices in order to access data. Also, we will not extract data from devices where storage is soldered onto the motherboard (such as T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops). Additionally, we do not recover data from phones and tablets, only drives that can be removed and sent to us. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Clearly mark the parcel with the name Bristol Data Recovery, and when your media has been diagnosed we will call you immediately.
If unsure about what to post, please call us first on 0800 689 0668 (the free phone number), or complete a free online diagnostic.
Diagnostic provided at no charge. Fixed quote. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.