Laptops seem to have an uncanny knack for picking their moment to fail. Dead on the day you had to finish that project; stuck in a restart loop just when you were finally sending those photos off somewhere safe; wearing a cup of tea by nine o'clock. The laptop may be past repair. In our experience the storage inside it generally isn't, and that's the part carrying your work.
Every laptop job is diagnosed free. The quote is written and fixed before a single screw is removed.
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 any laptop is matching the symptom to the fault, and after twenty-odd years these thirty problems cover almost everything that comes through the door.
The board or the charging circuit has gone, and the storage inside hasn't been touched. A bad week for the laptop, but a reasonable outlook for the files.
Corrosion works over a few days. Storage pulled out early nearly always survives; storage left in the machine for a fortnight is fighting chemistry, and chemistry has the advantage.
If you drop your laptop while the disk is spinning, there is a good chance the heads will catch the impact. In this case, donor work on the head-swap bench will follow. Switching it on again and again at home won't, because each start-up costs more of the surface.
Failing disk or broken Windows, the way out is the same: the files leave through the drive on our benches rather than through an operating system that can't be trusted to behave.
The system is wrecked and the documents are perfectly fine. One of the gentler jobs on this page, as long as the disk underneath is honest about its condition.
One boot error, no noise, no warnings. This is how most failures look today. We take the M.2 module out and move it to our flash bench, where it's treated like any other SSD case.
Blocked fans and clogged vents slowly cook the drive bay one evening at a time. The damage is real and builds up, so it's best to get the data off the drive while the heat hasn't finished its work.
Every component works properly except the screen. That makes the laptop useless but leaves the drive fine. Take the drive out at your end and we will image it here without a problem.
A rescue attempt has flattened the user accounts. We work through the areas of the disk the installer never touched, which on most disks is nearly all of it.
Recovers normally as long as the key or password comes with the drive. Mention it on the first call and nothing stalls later; leave it out and it stalls at the worst moment.
A stiff hinge can lever away at one corner for months before the board finally gives. The storage is in a completely different part of the casing and doesn't feel a thing.
That boot error message means the drive has read out its own obituary. Turn the machine off, take the drive out, and keep the laptop for parts if you like.
Free fall sensors park the heads when they are fast enough. Caught mid-write they sometimes aren't, and donor heads settle the difference afterwards.
Over time, Toshiba's everywhere-drive goes into slow reads and starts a soft ticking. It gets imaged with the weakest head left until last, which is exactly what imaging hardware is for.
No-name USB-C chargers spike the boards, and in some cases also harm the drive electronics behind them. Both have a well-worn path through this workshop.
An expanding battery cell presses on whatever is directly above it, which in a lot of designs is the storage. Stop charging it today and get the drive out this week, in that order.
Crush damage to the screen rarely reaches the storage. The drive comes out of the wreckage and images as if nothing happened, since from the drive's point of view, nothing did.
An SN570 or an SN770 can be there when you shut down and gone at the next start. Out of the laptop it comes and into service mode, where it usually has plenty to say.
Heat soak through glass ages storage quietly, and the read errors turn up weeks after the weather that caused them has been forgotten.
Intermittent DC jacks corrupt the file table a little at a time rather than in one go. This is why the machine gets steadily stranger until it stops working. The volume is stood back up from a full image.
A laptop in sleep mode that never actually slept, and a padded sleeve providing insulation a bit too well. The storage aged a year in one afternoon, and there is rarely only one such afternoon.
A new SSD half filled with data, the old drive already wiped for resale, and then the realisation arrives in between. We work underneath the wipe on the original, and the sooner everyone leaves it alone the more comes back.
Ultrabook lids pass every squeeze straight onto the board, and it's the solder joints of the module that keep score. Reflowed and imaged on the flash bench.
Windows lost track of your account and left you at a blank desktop. All the real folders still exist on the disk. Instead of trying to get back in through the operating system, we pull them off the disk directly.
Like every type of flash, these small soldered chips wear out and fail the same way. So let's just put this out there upfront: we do not take soldered storage, and we'd rather tell you now than after you've posted it.
Some computers pair a small fast module with a hard disk and present them as one drive. When the small module stops working, the pairing data goes with it, and the larger disk on its own will appear blank or unformatted. Both halves are imaged and the pairing is then undone in software, and the files are exactly where they always were.
A well-meaning shop runs consumer cloning software on a failing hard drive; it tries all the bad sectors over and over again for hours, until the drive is much worse at the end than it was at the start. We work from what is left, and we typically find more there than the owner has been led to expect.
The usual advice online after a spill does two unhelpful things: it leaves the liquid in contact with the components (so it keeps on corroding), and warm air pushes it deeper into the connectors. Getting the drive out and posted is worth more than any amount of drying, and it's worth doing on the first day, not the tenth.
By default Windows doesn't fully shut down; it hibernates the system files and picks them up again next time. If you force the power off in that state, or boot another system alongside it, the file structures are left describing a moment that no longer exists. It can be rebuilt from an image, but only from an image.
The retaining screw for the module is tiny, and it goes missing during upgrades more often than people admit. The module then sits at an angle, makes contact on and off, and drops out mid-write. What looks like a failing drive is a mechanical fault, and the free diagnostic tells the two apart before anybody spends money.
Whether you have a Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, MSI or Surface, the work is exactly the same, since all we need is the small disk or M.2 module under the base panel. Removing the base panel is your side of the arrangement, not ours. Taking drives out of laptops is not something we do here, but almost any computer shop in the city will remove a drive for a couple of quid if you don't fancy using a screwdriver. Send us just the storage and leave the rest of the laptop at home. One point needs to be taken seriously. A fair number of slim ultrabooks have their storage soldered onto the motherboard, and soldered chips can't be recovered on our bench. If you're not sure which kind you have, call 0800 689 0668 with the model number before you open anything up.
A drop that doesn't leave a mark on the casing can still put the heads down onto the platters, so if a machine clicks or hangs at the startup logo after an accident, switch it off and leave it off. It's the second and third attempts that turn a repairable drive into a scrapped one. Liquid is different. Once liquid has spilled, a corrosion clock starts. All the folk remedies lose that race: rice absorbs nothing worth having, a radiator bakes the residue in place, and switching it on to see if it still works accounts for a good portion of the real write offs. Get the storage out quickly, or hand the machine to someone who will, and the odds stay on your side.
Just about any storage format from the last twenty years could be inside a laptop, so nothing here is so specialised that it's narrow:
Logged on arrival, handled grounded throughout, and imaged in full before the recovery proper begins. The order doesn't change for anybody's deadline, because if we ever change it, that's when drives start getting lost.
SATA and NVMe M.2, mSATA, 2242 and 2230 stubs, Apple blades, and older IDE for the machines that came before all of them. Native connections for whatever the laptop was carrying.
We have firmware level access to laptop drives, exactly like the desktop and server work has. Just because the drive is smaller doesn't mean the job is, and it doesn't get treated as one.
Any head swap needed because a machine was dropped happens on the head-swap bench, using donor heads from matched stock rather than something that is "close enough".
Spill casualties go through corrosion treatment and an ultrasonic bath until boards and connectors can be reliably read. Only after that will imaging begin.
Imaging stays read-only from the first time a connection is made. Nothing on this bench is capable of writing to a customer's drive.
Fleet ThinkPads from the offices around Norwich Research Park, gaming MSIs and the family Pavilion still going in a back bedroom: inside each of these sits an MQ01ABD100 or WD10SPZX type drive, or an SN570 or SN770 type module, which are both described on their own pages. We don't want the whole machine, just the bare drive or module. And we'll set out our limits once, clearly: nothing soldered to a board, and no phones or tablets at all.
Lifebooks from office fleets and Amilos from box rooms keep arriving all over Norfolk long after Fujitsu stopped selling laptops here, and each one usually carries ten years of documents which are not stored anywhere else. The 2.5 inch drives inside these laptops follow a predictable sequence as they age: firmware hangs first, then heads that have just become worn out, then clusters of sector damage appear. Once the drive has been unscrewed and posted, all that remains is a straightforward mechanical recovery. The fragile areas are left until last and donors are only used where a head has actually died. The laptop can stay on its shelf at home the whole time.
Modern VivoBooks and ZenBooks go quietly. The M.2 module fails, the laptop says there is no boot device, and all of your files sit in the NAND waiting for either a session in service mode or a chip-level read. Toshiba's Satellite years were noisier about it: MQ generation drives such as the MQ01ABD100 wear their heads down, slow to a shuffle and "tick" when pressed. Both paths lead to the same benches, where the drive or module comes out, an image is made, and the data goes home. Only the thinnest laptops with storage soldered down are turned away, since any promise about those could never be an honest promise.
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 over the phone or with the free online diagnostic. The drive or M.2 module needs to be removed from the laptop before it travels, as we don't strip machines down here. Usually there is just one base panel and about six screws, and any decent local PC repair shop will take it out for next to nothing if you don't want to do it yourself. Put the bare unit in an anti-static bag, or a piece of foil, and send just that. Use tracked mail and insure it, or arrange your own courier, or hand it in at reception at our Cambridge location. There is no collection service, so you need to make the arrangements yourself. The only thing we can't take is storage soldered directly to the board, so if you are unsure what type of drive or module you have, call us first.
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.