Most homes have a photographic record of their whole past stored in a tower under the desk, and most small businesses keep their accounts in one much like it. A machine packing up and a disk packing up are two completely different things, and in almost all cases only the first has happened. The only things standing between a dead PC in Sprowston or Costessey and a padded envelope are two screws and two cables. Everything after that is our problem.
Every desktop computer job is diagnosed free. The quote is written and fixed before a screwdriver is ever picked up.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Electronic, mechanical, chip-level and physical work is charged at 50% upfront. Ransomware, forensic, BitLocker and CCTV/DVR jobs are charged 100% upfront on acceptance of our fixed quotation. Please refer to the data recovery cost page for full details on costs.
The first job on every desktop computer is matching the symptom to the fault. After twenty-odd years, these thirty causes account for virtually everything brought through the door.
Sick disk or broken system files. Either way, the documents come out through an image of the drive as opposed to an operating system that can barely stand up.
Mechanical failure, with plenty of commentary provided. Each restart from now on is borrowed against the platters, on terms nobody would agree to in writing.
Power supply and drive electronics burnt out together in a single strike, which is not uncommon on flat open ground with long supply runs. Repairing the board and carrying the ROM across reopens the conversation.
Off the bus due to a firmware fault, dead electronics or a tired cable. Each one leaves its own fingerprints and our benches read them. Guessing at home tends to add another cause to the list.
A new Windows sits lightly on top of the old data, right up until the computer carries on being used. Switch it off and the odds stop moving.
Shift-delete without a second thought until later. Recoverable so long as the freed space stays unused, which is a strong case for pulling the plug today rather than at the weekend.
Spreading bad sectors freeze everything mid-thought, because Windows keeps waiting for a disk that will never answer. Hardware imaging works around the damage and doesn't argue with it.
Encrypted desktops go to the isolated bench, where shadow copies and leftovers are looked for first. Nothing is ever attached to a network at any point.
A striped pair doubles your chances of failure. Both drives are fully imaged before anyone starts doing maths about stripe order.
Retired towers with PATA and SCSI disks holding the only copy of 2004. The legacy adapters on our shelf have never once been surplus to requirements.
BarraCudas of the ST1000DM010 era are the household tower's resident clickers. Donor heads on the head-swap bench, then a careful clone taken at whatever speed the drive will allow.
The WD10EZEX loses its board when the lights flicker. A matched donor PCB with the ROM moved across sorts it, and the platters were never involved.
An all-in-one is a laptop wearing a monitor. Stiffer to open, but identical to recover once the storage is out of it.
Disks boxed up at decommissioning and wanted years later often won't spin. They are imaged gently, with motor problems assumed from the beginning instead of discovered halfway.
Mixed modular power cables and careless static kill drives within a week, and the two look completely different on the bench. Electronics repair brings most of them back, a bit humbler.
The HDWD110 is the self-builder's default, and its head-wear cases keep one donor slot always reserved.
A drive nudged with its mounting screws loose will usually begin clicking several days later, making the cause hard to spot. New heads are fitted, and then the surface is imaged around the bruise.
Cases with felted vents run everything hot for thousands of uneventful hours, and then the wear all falls due at once. Nothing unusual happens until everything does.
New tower computers boot from a module that can stop just as suddenly as any drive, and with much less notice. These go to the NVMe side of our workshop.
WD_BLACK and Exos drives in rendering and CAD computers log punishing cycles. If either stumbles, we schedule imaging around whichever head is weakest, and this is decided by actual measurement rather than optimism.
Sagging supply out in the villages corrupts writes bit by bit. There are no warning flags, nothing trips and nothing announces itself. The file system is rebuilt from a full image of the disk.
Aggressive head parking runs the load count into the hundreds of thousands and wears down the ramp before the platters. Image it before that count goes even higher, because it climbs whether anyone is watching or not.
Ten years, one cable, no movement, then CRC errors and a drive blamed for a connector's failings. We check that before taking any drastic action, because it costs nothing to rule out.
A second internal drive dutifully mirroring the first, until a power supply event takes down both. Both are recovered; the backup strategy gets a gentle word afterwards.
Out of the old computer, never quite into the new one, and the floor got involved. Head damage without a computer in the story at all, and it's still head-swap bench work.
The SATA power connector is designed to make contact in a particular order, and if you push it in at an angle while the system is on, voltage can end up where it doesn't belong. The board dies immediately. The usual fix is board repair with the ROM carried across, and it generally works.
Computers in unheated outbuildings are exposed to things no data sheet ever planned for: grain dust, damp winters and the odd mouse. Dust packs the drive's breather filter, chewed cables short things out, and condensation finishes the job. However, the drives themselves are much more durable than people realise and survive more of it than anyone would guess.
When NTFS runs low on space, it becomes fragile. The master file table can't extend cleanly, updates land in awkward places, and one bad shutdown leaves the structure in pieces. It can be rebuilt entirely from an image, and it can be avoided entirely by keeping some space free.
Bought cheaply online from sellers with the SMART figures reset or the hours misreported, and it fails within months of arriving. The failure is ordinary, but the surprise isn't, because the owner had no reason to think the drive was already old.
Unheated outbuildings on the coast cause a double whammy. Condensation forms on the boards every time the temperature swings, and the salt in the air speeds it up. Since the corrosion is on the electronics rather than the platters, most of the time your data is fine after the board is repaired or replaced and the ROM chip transferred.
The tower is the easiest machine of all to help in this trade. The side panel comes off, a couple of screws are pulled, the two cables are unclipped, and the drive is ready for an envelope. An all-in-one is like a laptop standing upright behind a pane of glass, and a few of them won't open as easily as others, so call us before trying to lever one apart instead of after. Norfolk presents a hazard of its own. The long overhead lines that run across the flat farmland take a storm right in the face, rural single phase supplies pass a good amount of that on to whatever is plugged in, and the low ground by the rivers and the Broads takes water more often than the people living there expect. Disks from either situation recover much more often than their owners think, but there is one strict condition: no one plugs one in to see if it still works. That one action ruins more flood damaged drives than the flood itself.
A slow computer goes somewhere to be looked at, comes back quick and completely blank, and the documents went with the old installation. It's a story that turns up most weeks, but it's not as final as it sounds, because an installer only writes to a small portion of the disk. The majority of what was there before is still under the new Windows, unlinked but perfectly intact. Ordinary use will eat away at it. Each time you browse, update or install, something new gets placed on top. So instead of waiting until the weekend, stop today, get the disk out, and let the carve pull back everything the installer never reached.
A desktop drive gets the whole weight of the workshop behind it, and the legacy shelf catches whatever the older towers bring in:
Firmware access for anything a tower may hold, regardless of how old it is, how large it is or how it interfaces.
Unsteady drives are captured in full under hardware retry control instead of being handed to some optimistic software loop and left overnight.
Clicking tower drives take donor head assemblies on the head-swap bench, with parts pulled from catalogued stock matching both model and firmware family.
IDE and PATA, SCSI, early SATA. Two decades of retired family machines are still readable here, and we use the legacy shelf much more than anyone expects.
First off, there is a complete capture on the imaging hardware. Everything that follows happens on the copy while the original sits still and does nothing else.
From booking in, the drive is physically read-only. None of these processes are able to write to customer media.
OptiPlex estates in the business parks, gaming rigs built at the kitchen table and the tower that has quietly run the printer since 2014. Each one will almost certainly have a WD10EZEX, a Seagate ST1000DM010 BarraCuda or a Toshiba HDWD110 P300 inside, and these three are responsible for most of the clicking and most of the surge damage on this page. All-in-ones are counted as desktops on this page even though everything behind the glass is laptop from end to end.
In its day the iMedia was the family computer bought along with the weekly shop, and its disks reach us by two routes: still bolted into a tower that no longer starts, or loose in a drawer with "important, probably" written on a label. The classic self-inflicted wound is the factory restore, used as a cure for slowness, which buries years of photographs under a new version of Windows. Almost all of that is still there underneath and comes out through one complete sector image. The older IDE and early SATA mechanisms connect through the legacy shelf and get imaged at the unhurried pace their age has earned.
Pavilions from spare rooms and OptiPlex estates from offices keep the booking sheet comfortably full, joined by the odd Presario-era Compaq, often after a recovery disk reinstall buried the very documents it was supposed to protect. That can be reversed from one full sector image. Decommissioned drives have their own cycle: shelved as part of a clear-out, wanted several years later for the accounts on them, and now won't spin up after all this time. Home towers arrive after a storm took out both the power supply and the drive electronics, or after Windows has hung at the logo above a field of bad sectors. Please send us the bare drive on its own. It is imaged first, repaired where needed, and then the data comes back on new media.
Remove the drive first and send us just the bare drive. Not sure how? Phone us on 0800 689 0668 and someone will walk you through it, or a local computer shop will do it for very little.
Get a quote first, either over the phone or using the free online diagnostic. Next remove the side panel, two screws and the two leads, and only the bare drive travels. Taking it out is a job for your end rather than ours. Send it tracked and insured, use a courier of your choice, or drop it into our reception at our Cambridge location. We don't offer a collection service. The tower stays at home, the postage stays small, and the drive honestly travels better out of the case than in it.
Most items arrive at this bench by insured and tracked post. We recommend getting a quote first, either by telephone or using our free online diagnostic, and once you have received your quote, simply post the item. Post is the steadiest way to move a poorly drive, and a parcel sent from Norfolk typically arrives on the bench within a working day.
Is the drive still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR recorder? Before sending, remove the hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD), as we do not accept whole units. From a DVR or recorder, send just the disk. From a server or RAID, take out the disks and clearly label each disk by bay number. A network attached storage (NAS) device may be sent as its disks if they can be removed; otherwise please send the NAS itself. There is only one type of drive we are unable to accept: storage soldered onto a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs, extremely thin laptops). In such cases, if the storage cannot be taken out it cannot be accepted. If you are unsure whether you have a removable drive or not, call us before sending anything.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Please mark the parcel for the attention of Cambridge Data Recovery. It takes about an hour and twenty minutes to travel from Norwich along the A11, then two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32. Otherwise you can post it using a tracked service and we will receive it the following working day. We will contact you as soon as we have your drive and it is booked onto our bench.
If you're unsure of what to include in the box, please call us on 0800 689 0668 before sealing it. Or, for a first view on what we can do, you can use our free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, one fixed figure written down, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start online or ring us.