Laptops pick their moment carefully. Dead on deadline morning; stuck in a restart loop the very evening the photographs were finally going somewhere safe; wearing a cup of tea by nine o'clock. The machine may well be beyond help. The storage inside it, in our experience, generally is not, and that is the part carrying your work.
Every laptop 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 laptop is matching the symptom to the fault — and after twenty-odd years, these thirty account for very nearly everything that comes through the door.
The board or the charging circuit has gone and the storage inside has not been touched. A poor week for the laptop, a reasonable outlook for the files.
Corrosion works to a timetable measured in days. Storage pulled out early nearly always escapes; storage left sitting in the machine for a fortnight is fighting chemistry, and chemistry has the advantage.
The drive was turning when the machine landed and the heads caught the impact. Donor work in filtered air follows. Repeated switching on at home does not, because each attempt costs surface.
Failing disk or broken Windows, the way out is the same in both cases: the files leave through the drive on our benches rather than through an operating system that cannot be trusted to behave.
The system is wrecked and the documents are perfectly fine. One of the gentler jobs on this page, provided the disk underneath is honest about its condition.
No noise, no warning, one boot error. It is the modern failure. The M.2 module is taken out and moved across to the flash bench, where it is treated like any other solid-state case.
Blocked fans and felted vents slow-roast the drive bay one evening at a time. The wear is real and cumulative, and the sensible move is to lift the data clear before the heat completes its work.
Everything works except the panel, which makes the laptop useless and the drive entirely fine. Take the drive out at your end and it images at ours without a murmur.
User accounts flattened by a rescue attempt. We work through the regions the installer never went near, which on most disks is the large majority of them.
Recovers normally provided the key or the password comes with the drive. Mention it on the first call and nothing stalls later on; leave it out and it stalls at the worst moment.
A stiff hinge levers away at one corner for months until the board finally gives. The storage sits elsewhere in the chassis and never feels a thing.
That boot message is the drive reading out its own obituary. Switch 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 quick enough. Caught mid-write they sometimes are not, and donor heads settle the difference afterwards.
Toshiba's everywhere-drive fades into slow reads and a soft tick. It gets imaged with the weakest head left until last, which is exactly what imaging hardware is for.
No-brand USB-C bricks spike boards and sometimes the drive electronics sitting behind them. Both have a well-worn path through this workshop.
The cell expands and presses on whatever sits 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.
Screen-first crush damage rarely reaches the storage. The drive comes out of the wreckage and images as though nothing happened, because as far as it is concerned nothing did.
An SN570 or SN770 can be there at shutdown and gone by the next start-up. Out of the laptop it comes, 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 file tables a little at a time rather than all at once, which is why the machine gets steadily stranger before it stops. The volume gets stood back up out of a full image.
Sleep mode that never quite slept, and a padded sleeve doing its insulating job rather too well. The storage ages a year over one afternoon, and there is rarely only one such afternoon.
New SSD half populated, old drive already wiped ready for resale, and the realisation arriving in between. We work underneath the wipe on the original, and the sooner everybody stops touching it, the more comes back.
Ultrabook lids pass every squeeze straight through to the board, and it is the module's solder joints that keep score. Reflowed and imaged on the flash bench.
Windows has mislaid the account and offered an empty desktop instead. The real folders are still on the disk; we take them off directly rather than negotiating with the operating system.
Small soldered chips wear like any other flash and fail the same way. Stated straight, as always: soldered storage is beyond what we take on, and we would rather say so now than after you have posted it.
Some machines pair a small fast module with a hard disk and present the two as one drive. When the little module fails, the pairing metadata goes and the large disk on its own looks blank or unformatted. Both halves get imaged and the pairing is unpicked in software, at which point the files are exactly where they always were.
A well-meaning shop runs consumer cloning software at a failing disk, it retries every bad sector for hours, and the drive is materially worse by the end than it was at the start. We work from what is left, and there is usually more of it than the owner has been led to expect.
The internet's standard advice after a spill does two unhelpful things: it leaves the liquid in place to keep corroding, and warm air drives it further into connectors. Getting the drive out and posted is worth more than any amount of drying, and it is worth doing on the first day rather than the tenth.
Windows does not fully shut down by default; it hibernates the system files and picks them up next time. Force the power off in that state, or boot another system alongside it, and the file structures are left describing a moment that no longer exists. It rebuilds from an image, but only from an image.
The retaining screw is small, and it goes missing during upgrades more often than anyone admits. The module then sits at an angle, makes contact intermittently, and drops out mid-write. What looks like a dying drive is a mechanical fault, and the free diagnostic tells the two apart before anybody spends money.
Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, MSI or a Surface — the job does not change, because the only component needed is the small disk or M.2 module hiding behind the base panel. Opening that panel is your side of the arrangement, not ours — taking drives out of machines is not a service offered here, and any computer shop in the city will free one for a few pounds if screwdrivers hold no appeal. Send the storage on its own and let the rest of the laptop stay at home. There is one warning worth taking seriously: a fair number of slim ultrabooks have their memory soldered to the mainboard, and soldered chips fall outside what this bench recovers. Not sure which kind you have? A quick call to 0800 689 0668 with the model number settles it before anything gets unscrewed.
A drop that leaves no mark on the casing can still put the heads down onto the platters, so a machine clicking or hanging at the logo after an accident wants switching off and leaving off; it is the second and third attempts that turn a repairable disk into a scrapped one. Liquid works differently. A spill starts a corrosion clock, and every folk remedy loses that race: rice absorbs nothing worth having, a radiator bakes the residue into place, and switching it on to check whether it still works accounts for a good proportion of the genuine write-offs. Get the storage out promptly, or hand the machine to somebody who will, and the odds stay comfortably on your side.
Almost any storage format of the past twenty years might be inside a laptop, so nothing here is specialised to the point of being narrow:
Logged on arrival, handled grounded throughout, and imaged in full before recovery proper begins. That order does not change for anybody's deadline, because changing it is how drives get lost.
SATA and NVMe M.2, mSATA, 2242 and 2230 stubs, Apple blades, and elderly IDE for the machines that predate all of it. Native connections for whatever the laptop was carrying.
Firmware-level access for laptop drives, identical to what the desktop and server work gets. A small drive is not a small job and does not get treated as one.
Head swaps for dropped machines happen in filtered air, with donors drawn from matched stock rather than from whatever looks close enough.
Spill casualties are given corrosion treatment and an ultrasonic bath until boards and connectors read dependably. Then, and only then, imaging starts.
Imaging is enforced read-only from the first connection onward. 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 all of them sit the MQ01ABD100 and WD10SPZX class of drive, or the SN570 and SN770 class of module, both covered in detail on their own pages. It is the bare drive or module we need, not the machine. The boundaries are simple and we would rather give them 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 across Norfolk long after Fujitsu stopped selling laptops here, and they generally carry a decade of documents that exist in no other place. The 2.5-inch drives inside them age to a predictable schedule: firmware hangs first, then heads that have grown tired, then sector damage turning up in clusters. Once the drive has been unscrewed and posted, the job is straightforward mechanical recovery, with the fragile regions left until last and donors brought in only where a head has genuinely died. The laptop can stay on its shelf at home throughout.
A modern VivoBook or ZenBook goes quietly. The M.2 module fails, the machine announces that it has no boot device, and every file waits in the NAND for either a session in service mode or a chip-level read. Toshiba's Satellite years are noisier about it: MQ-generation drives like the MQ01ABD100 wear their heads down, slow to a shuffle, and tick when pressed. Both routes end at the same benches, where the drive or module comes out, an image is taken, and the data goes home. The only ones turned away are the thinnest machines with their storage soldered down, because any promise about those would not be an honest promise.
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.
The drive or M.2 module needs to come out before it travels, because stripping machines down is not work done at this end. On most laptops that is one base panel and half a dozen screws, and any repair shop will oblige for very little if you would rather not do it yourself. Put the bare unit into an anti-static bag, or failing that a sheet of foil, and send only that — post it tracked and insured, use your own courier, or hand it in at reception at our Cambridge location. There is no collection service, so the journey needs arranging by you. The one thing beyond us is storage soldered directly onto the board.
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.