Although the laptop itself has died at the power button, is looping at the logo, dropped down the stairs or even had coffee spilled onto it, the drive inside it is usually still alive. From student machines in Swansea to business fleets throughout South Wales, we will recover your data once we receive your drive.
A free diagnostic is carried out on all laptop jobs. There will be one fixed price given in writing for your job before we carry out any work.
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.
Each laptop job commences by relating the symptom(s) to the fault. These fifteen cover almost all of the faults which reach the bench.
Failure of the board or charger, but the internal drive is intact: the most common worst case / best case scenario.
Liquid corrosion starts developing within a few days of the spillage occurring. In most cases, however, the storage unit survives if it is quickly extracted from the damaged system.
The landing was taken by one or more of the hard drive's heads, then donor work on the bench follows.
When a computer fails to boot up due to bad storage (or broken Windows) the data can be extracted from the drive itself and not through an operating system.
The operating system has failed; the document files have not. A straightforward extraction will solve this problem.
Modern laptops fail silently and with no warning when the M.2 solid state drive (SSD) fails.
If the fans are blocked on your system and all they do is slowly roast the hard drive then the files will be extracted before the hard drive stops working completely.
All of your system functions properly with the exception of your display. The hard drive can be removed from the system after this point and imaged perfectly.
A "repair" install will remove all of the user account information. Our recovery does exactly what its name states: it allows for data to be recovered from the areas of the hard disk that were never changed by an installation.
Recovery of encrypted storage is normal when using your key/password. Mention this if you contact us.
If the stress on the motherboard from cracking the hinges gets too much, it will fail. This would leave your hard drive intact.
When your HP computer boots up and shows you that there is a SMART error code 301 this is just your drive telling you that it is failing. You need to turn off your computer immediately, receive a quote and send us your drive.
Machines can fall badly even if they have protection; a spinning drive during a fall still means donor heads.
Toshiba's most common laptop hard drive line (MQ01ABD100) will eventually read slowly and tick; they are imaged in weakest head last order.
Cheap USB-C adapters can surge your board and sometimes the drive's electronics: there is a path to fix these as well.
The brand is irrelevant (Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, MSI, Surface); the job is the same. Either way there is either a 2.5 inch drive underneath the base plate or an M.2 stick. This is what we want: take off the base plate, remove the drive and when you get your quote for the recovery of the data, send us just the drive since we do not provide removal of your drive from your computer. Note that some ultra-thin laptops use solder to attach the storage to the motherboard. In these cases we cannot assist with recovering data as we are limited to recovering data from removable storage devices. Call 0800 689 0668 first if you're unsure whether your laptop has a removable drive.
A hard drive head can be killed by an impact (the laptop may look fine), but if the laptop is clicking, whirring or hanging on the logo screen afterwards, power it down and leave it alone. A spill is a corrosion countdown; no rice, no hair dryers, no hopeful retries. Get the storage unit out quickly (or get the machine to someone who will do it correctly), and the data should still come through. Usually the drive survives the accident that kills the computer.
Laptop drives will use all of the formats used in storage; therefore, this bench is equipped with the whole stack for each type of storage format:
We log the drive or SSD that you pulled from your laptop when it arrives at our bench; it will be treated with anti-static procedures throughout its life cycle at our bench and then we'll begin doing work to recover data from it after an image is created.
The adapter drawer has everything from M.2 NVMe/SATA, mSATA, 2230/2242 to Apple blades, etc., as well as legacy IDE. The adapter drawer connects whatever you had inside your laptop, natively.
A bad laptop drive is given the same level of access to the firmware that a bare drive on the shelf would get.
Head swaps for dropped laptop drives occur on this workbench using donor heads from the matched library.
Corrosion is removed from spill damaged drives and connectors in an ultrasonic bath until the drive is readable.
All extracted drives are imaged in read-only mode prior to doing anything else.
Rigs for gaming with dual drives, a sealed ultrabook, a ten year old family Pavilion, etc. They all have the same MQ01ABD100-class 2.5" drives and the M.2 SN550-class sticks the dedicated drive pages describe, and it's those that we are looking to have posted. Just plug-in removable drives; no soldered on-board storage will be accepted. All mobile devices (phones/tablets) are excluded.
Office-fleet Lifebooks and home-range Amilos are continually being pulled out from South Wales cupboards long after Fujitsu ceased to be a supplier of laptops in the UK, normally holding 10 years of un-copied documents. Their 2.5-inch disks age fairly predictably: the firmware will hang or stop functioning; the heads will continue to operate but at slower speeds; and sectors will fail in large clusters. The recovery is simply standard mechanical work once the hard disk has been removed from the Lifebook and posted, with the weak areas of each disk imaged last and donor parts fitted only when the heads have actually failed. In no case does the Lifebook need to travel with it.
Today's ZenBooks and VivoBooks go silently; an M.2 stick fails, a "no boot device" message displays, but all files wait safely in the flash for either a service mode session or a chip level read. Instead of silently failing, Toshiba's Satellite series fail audibly: the MQ01ABD100-class hard drives will eventually begin to wear their heads and crawl, then tick as they become loaded. Both stories end up at the same workbench: drive removed, drive cloned, data returned home. The only machines turned away are the very slimmest ones that have storage soldered to the board, which no lab can honestly promise on.
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.
Take the drive or M.2 stick out before sending. Drive removal is something we do not offer as a service. Most laptop models will allow for removal using one base panel and a few screws. Once you receive your quote please send us the bare drive wrapped in an anti-static bag or aluminium foil. Please be aware that soldered storage devices are the exception we cannot help with, because our services are limited to recovering data from removable drives.
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.