Most households keep an entire photographic history in a tower under a desk, and most small firms keep the accounts in one much like it. A machine packing up and a disk packing up are two separate events, and usually only the first has happened. Two screws and two cables stand between a dead PC in Sprowston or Costessey and a padded envelope; everything after that is our problem rather than yours.
Every desktop computer job is diagnosed free. The quote follows in writing, fixed, before a screwdriver is picked up.
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.
The first job on any desktop computer is matching the symptom to the fault — and after twenty-odd years, these thirty account for very nearly everything that comes through the door.
Sick disk or broken system files. Either way the documents leave through an image of the drive rather than through an operating system that is already struggling to stand up.
Mechanical failure, providing its own commentary. Every restart from now on is borrowed against the platters at a rate nobody would agree to in writing.
Power supply and drive electronics burnt together in one strike, which is a common enough event on flat open ground with long supply runs. Board repair and a ROM carried across reopens the conversation.
Off the bus through a firmware fault, dead electronics or a tired cable. Every cause leaves different fingerprints and the bench reads them; guessing at home tends to add a fourth cause.
A fresh Windows sits lightly on top of old data, right up until the machine carries on being used. Switch it off and the odds stop moving.
Shift and delete, and no second thoughts until later. Recoverable while the freed space stays unclaimed, which is a strong argument for pulling the plug today rather than at the weekend.
Spreading bad sectors freeze everything mid-thought, because Windows keeps politely waiting for a drive that will never answer. Imaging hardware steps around the damage instead of arguing with it.
Encrypted desktops go to the isolated bench, where shadow copies and leftovers are looked for first and nothing is connected to a network at any point.
A striped pair is twice as many ways to fail. Both members are imaged completely before anybody starts doing arithmetic about stripe order.
Retired towers with PATA and SCSI disks holding the only copy of 2004. The legacy adapters on the shelf here have never once been surplus to requirements.
BarraCudas of the ST1000DM010 era are the resident clickers inside household towers. Donor heads in filtered air, then a careful clone taken at whatever pace the drive will tolerate.
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, and identical to recover the moment the storage is out of it.
Disks boxed at decommissioning and wanted years later frequently decline to spin. They are imaged gently, with motor trouble assumed from the start rather than discovered halfway.
Mixed modular power leads and casual static kill drives within a week, and the two look nothing alike on the bench. Electronics repair returns most of them, somewhat humbler.
The HDWD110 is the self-builder's default, and its head-wear cases keep one donor slot permanently reserved.
A drive nudged with its mounting screws loose starts clicking days later, which makes the cause hard to spot. Fresh heads, and then the surface is imaged around the bruise.
A felted case runs everything hot for thousands of unremarkable hours, and then the wear all falls due at once. Nothing dramatic happens until everything does.
New towers start from a module that can stop as suddenly as any drive and with rather less warning. Those go to the NVMe side of the workshop.
WD_BLACK and Exos drives in render and CAD machines log punishing cycles. When they stumble, imaging is scheduled around whichever head is weakest, and that decision is made from measurement rather than optimism.
Sagging supply out in the villages corrupts writes by degrees, and it never trips anything or announces itself. The file system is rebuilt from a complete image.
Aggressive head parking runs the load count into six figures and wears the ramp out well before the platters tire. Image it before that counter climbs further still, because it climbs whether anybody 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 anybody does anything drastic, because it costs nothing to rule out.
A second internal drive dutifully mirroring the first until one power supply event takes both. Both get recovered; the backup strategy gets a gentle word afterwards.
Out of the old machine, never quite into the new one, and the floor got involved. Head damage with no computer in the story at all, and it is still filtered-air work.
SATA power connectors are shaped to make contact in a particular order, and pushing one in at an angle while the machine is live can put voltage where it does not belong. The board dies instantly. Board repair with the ROM carried across is the standard answer, and it usually works.
Grain dust, damp winters and the occasional mouse in an unheated outbuilding do things to a computer that no data sheet anticipates. Dust packs the drive's breather filter, chewed cables short things out, and condensation finishes the job. The drives themselves survive more of it than anyone would guess.
NTFS gets fragile when there is no room left to work in. The master file table cannot extend cleanly, updates land in awkward places, and one bad shutdown leaves the structure in pieces. It is entirely rebuildable from an image, and entirely avoidable by leaving some space free.
Bought cheaply online with the SMART figures reset or the hours misreported, and it fails within months of arriving. The failure is ordinary, but the surprise is not, because the owner had no reason to think the drive was already old.
Unheated outbuildings on the coast do two things at once: condensation forms on the boards every time the temperature swings, and salt in the air helps it along. The corrosion is on the electronics rather than the platters, so the data is usually fine once the board is repaired or replaced with the ROM carried over.
Of everything in this trade, a tower is the easiest machine to help. Side panel off, a couple of screws out, the two cables unclipped, and the disk is ready for an envelope. An all-in-one is essentially a laptop stood on end behind a pane of glass, and a few of them resist being opened, so ring before levering at one rather than after. Norfolk contributes a hazard of its own. Long overhead runs across flat farmland take a storm full in the face, rural single-phase supplies pass a surprising share of that along to whatever happens to be plugged in, and the low ground near the rivers and the Broads takes water more often than the people living on it expect. Disks out of both situations recover far more frequently than their owners assume, on the strict condition that nobody has connected one to find out whether it still works. That single act destroys more flood-damaged drives than the flood does.
A sluggish machine goes somewhere to be looked at, comes back quick and completely blank, and the documents departed with the previous installation. That story turns up most weeks and it is a good deal less final than it sounds, because an installer writes to a modest fraction of the surface and the bulk of what was there before is still underneath the new Windows, unreferenced but perfectly intact. What eats into it is ordinary use — every hour of browsing, updating and installing puts something fresh on top. So the useful response is to stop today rather than at the weekend, get the disk out, and let the carve pull back everything the installer never reached.
A desktop drive gets the whole weight of this workshop behind it, and the legacy shelf catches whatever the older towers bring in:
Firmware access for anything a tower might be holding, whatever its age, its capacity or its interface habits.
Unsteady drives are captured in full under hardware retry control rather than being handed to an optimistic software loop and left overnight.
Clicking tower drives take donor head assemblies in filtered air, with parts drawn from catalogued stock matched on model and firmware family.
IDE and PATA, SCSI, early SATA. Two decades of retired family machines remain readable in this building, and that shelf gets used more than you would expect.
A complete capture on imaging hardware comes first. Everything after that happens on the copy while the original sits still and is not asked to do anything else.
From booking in onward the drive is physically read-only. No stage of this process is capable of writing to customer media.
OptiPlex estates from the business parks, gaming rigs put together at a kitchen table, and the tower that has quietly run the printer since 2014. Open any of them and it is nearly always a WD10EZEX, an ST1000DM010 BarraCuda or an HDWD110 P300 inside, and between them those three account 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 what sits behind the glass is laptop from end to end.
In its day the iMedia was the family computer people bought along with the weekly shop, and its disks arrive here by two routes: still bolted into a tower that has stopped starting, or loose in a drawer with a label along the lines of important, probably. The classic self-inflicted wound is the factory restore, applied as a cure for slowness, which buries years of photographs beneath a brand-new Windows. Almost all of that is still there underneath and comes out through one complete sector image. Old IDE and early SATA mechanisms connect by way of the legacy shelf and get imaged at whatever unhurried pace their age has earned.
Pavilions out of spare rooms and OptiPlex estates out of offices keep the booking sheet comfortably full, with the occasional Presario-era Compaq still coming in behind them, often after a recovery-disk reinstall buried the very documents it was supposed to protect. That is reversible from one full sector image. Drives that were decommissioned have an arc of their own: shelved during a clear-out, wanted years later for the accounts on them, and now unwilling to turn after so long a rest. Home towers arrive after a storm has taken the power supply and the drive electronics in one go, or when Windows stops at its logo above a field of bad sectors. Send the bare drive by itself. It is imaged first, repaired where repair is needed, and the data comes back on fresh media.
Take the drive out of the machine first; only the bare drive comes to us. Not sure how? Ring 0800 689 0668 and someone will walk you through it, or a computer shop in town will do it for very little.
Side panel off, two screws, 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 choosing, or bring it in to reception at our Cambridge location. There is no collection service. The tower stays at home, the postage stays small, and honestly the drive travels better out of the case than in it.
Most of what reaches this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the steadiest way to move a poorly drive, and a parcel posted in Norfolk is usually on the bench the next working day.
Is the drive still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR recorder? The hard drive or SSD needs to come out first, and only the bare drive travels — taking drives out of machines is not something we do here. Storage soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, one or two very thin laptops) is the single thing beyond us: if it will not come out, it cannot come in.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Mark the parcel for the attention of Cambridge Data Recovery. From Norwich it is about an hour and twenty down the A11, then two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32 — or next working day by tracked post. You hear from us as soon as it is booked onto the bench.
Unsure what to put in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or run the free online diagnostic.
Diagnosis free, one figure written down, most work under no fix no fee. Start online, or ring us.