Dead at the power button, looping at the logo, dropped on the stairs or christened with coffee — the laptop may be finished, but the drive inside it rarely is. From student machines in Swansea to business fleets across South Wales, we recover the data once the drive reaches us.
Free diagnostic on every laptop 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 laptop job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these fifteen cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Board or charging failure with an unharmed drive inside — the most common best-case worst-case.
Corrosion starts within days; the storage usually escapes if it's extracted quickly.
The hard drive's heads took the landing — clean-bench donor work follows.
Failing storage or a broken Windows — either way, the data leaves via the drive, not the OS.
The system is wrecked, the documents aren't; a straightforward extraction.
Modern laptops die without a sound when the M.2 stick inside gives out.
Blocked fans slow-roast the drive; the data comes off before the drive finishes failing.
Everything works except the panel — the drive comes out and images cleanly.
A 'repair' reinstall erases the accounts; recovery works the regions the installer never touched.
Encrypted storage recovers normally with your key or password — flag it when you get in touch.
A cracked hinge stresses the motherboard until it fails, sparing the storage entirely.
HP's boot warning is a failing drive announcing itself — power off and send the drive.
Even protected machines land badly; a spinning drive mid-fall still means donor heads.
Toshiba's ubiquitous laptop drive family ages into slow reads and ticking — imaged weakest-head-last.
Cheap USB-C chargers spike the board and sometimes the drive's electronics — both have repair paths.
Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, MSI, Surface — the badge doesn't change the job. Under the base panel sits either a 2.5-inch drive or an M.2 stick, and that's the part we need: unscrew the panel, unplug the drive, and post the drive alone, because we don't offer a drive-removal service. Be aware that some slim ultrabooks solder their storage to the board — those we have to decline, as we only recover removable drives. Ring 0800 689 0668 first if you're not sure which kind you own.
An impact can kill a hard drive's heads while the laptop looks untouched — clicking, whirring or hanging at the logo afterwards means power off and stay off. Spills are a corrosion countdown: no rice, no hairdryer, no hopeful retries. Get the storage out (or the machine to someone who can do it) quickly, and the data usually comes through — the drive normally survives the accident that kills the computer.
Laptop drives span every storage format going, so this bench carries the whole stack:
The drive or SSD you removed is logged on arrival, handled anti-statically throughout, and imaged before recovery work starts.
From M.2 NVMe and SATA through mSATA and 2230/2242 to Apple blades and vintage IDE — the adapter drawer connects whatever was inside, natively.
A failed laptop drive gets the same firmware-level access as any bare drive on the shelf.
Head swaps for dropped-laptop drives happen under filtered air with donors from the matched library.
Spill-damaged drives and connectors are corrosion-treated and cleaned until the drive can be read.
Every extracted drive is imaged read-only before anything else is attempted.
Gaming rigs with two drives, sealed ultrabooks, and the ten-year-old family Pavilion alike — inside they carry the same MQ01ABD100-class 2.5" drives and SN550-class M.2 sticks the dedicated drive pages describe, and those are what we need posted. Only drives that unplug, though — soldered-down storage is the standing refusal, and phones and tablets are off the menu entirely.
Office-fleet Lifebooks and home-range Amilos keep climbing out of South Wales cupboards long after Fujitsu left the UK laptop market, usually holding ten years of documents nobody ever copied elsewhere. Their 2.5-inch disks age predictably — firmware that hangs, heads that slow, sectors failing in clusters — and the recovery is routine mechanical work once the drive is unscrewed and posted: weak regions imaged last, donor parts fitted only where the heads have truly gone. The Lifebook itself never needs to make the trip.
Today's VivoBooks and ZenBooks go quietly: the M.2 stick fails, a 'no boot device' message appears, and every file waits unharmed in the flash for a service-mode session or a chip-level read. Toshiba's Satellite era fails audibly instead — MQ01ABD100-class drives wear their heads, crawl, then tick under load. Both stories end at the same bench: drive out, drive imaged, data home. The only machines turned away are the very slimmest with storage soldered to the board, which no lab can honestly promise on.
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.
Take the drive or M.2 stick out before posting — drive removal isn't a service we provide. One base panel and a handful of screws frees it on most laptops; wrap the bare drive in an anti-static bag or foil and post that alone. Soldered-storage machines are the exception we can't help with, since only removable drives are recoverable here.
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.