The tower under a desk generally holds an entire family photographic history. The one in the corner of a small office generally holds the accounts. A machine failing and a disk failing are two different events. Normally only the first has happened. Between a dead PC in Cults or Kingswells and a padded envelope there are two screws and two cables. What follows is our problem, not yours.
Every desktop computer job is diagnosed free. The fixed figure reaches you in writing first, before any tools come out.
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.
First job on any desktop computer is matching the symptom to the fault. Twenty-odd years in, these twenty-five cover nearly every one that reaches this bench.
Sick disk, or system files past repair. Either way the documents come out of an image of the drive, not out of an operating system that can barely stand up.
Mechanical failure, narrating itself out loud. Heads, bearing or motor, and the noise means metal is meeting something it should not. From here every restart is borrowed against the platters on terms nobody would sign for.
One strike takes the power supply and the drive board together, which happens often enough on long rural feeds across open ground. Board repair with the ROM moved across reopens the conversation.
Firmware fault, dead board electronics, or a cable past its best. Each leaves its own fingerprints and a bench can read them. Swapping parts at home usually just introduces a fourth possibility.
Fresh Windows sits lightly on old data, right up until somebody carries on using the machine. Shut it down and the odds stop moving against you that minute.
Shift and delete, no hesitation, regret arriving later. Recoverable for as long as the freed space stays unclaimed, which argues hard for pulling the plug now instead of at the weekend.
Bad sectors on the spread freeze the machine mid-thought, because Windows keeps waiting on a drive that will never reply. Imaging hardware routes around damage rather than arguing with it.
Encrypted desktops go straight to the isolated bench. Shadow copies and remnants get searched for first, and nothing touches a network at any stage of that work.
A striped pair doubles the number of ways to lose everything. Both members get imaged in full before anybody starts working out stripe order and offsets.
Retired towers holding PATA and SCSI disks with the only surviving copy of 2004 on them. Nobody here has yet regretted keeping those legacy adapters on the rack.
In family towers the resident clicker is nearly always a BarraCuda of the ST1000DM010 era. Donor heads go in under filtered air, then the clone runs at whatever pace the drive will put up with.
When the lights flicker hard enough, a WD10EZEX loses its board. Fit a matched donor board, move the ROM over, and it comes back, because the platters were never part of the incident.
An all-in-one is laptop hardware hiding behind a monitor, which makes it stiffer to open and no different at all to recover. Once the storage is out and sitting on a bench, the badge on the front stops mattering.
Disks put in a box at decommissioning, then wanted years afterwards, often refuse to spin at all. Imaging assumes motor trouble from the start rather than discovering it partway through, which saves the drive.
HDWD110 units went into shop-built and self-built towers by the thousand, so their head-wear cases keep one slot on the donor rack permanently spoken for and the outcomes are well understood.
A felted case runs everything warm for thousands of unremarkable hours, then the wear falls due in a single week. Nothing dramatic happens until absolutely everything does.
Modern towers boot from a module capable of stopping as abruptly as any drive, and with less warning beforehand. Those go across to the NVMe side of the workshop.
WD_BLACK and Exos drives in render, CAD and seismic-processing machines log punishing cycles. When one stumbles, imaging is planned around whichever head is weakest, and that call comes from measurement rather than hope.
Sagging supply out in the shire corrupts writes by degrees. It trips nothing and announces nothing. The file system gets rebuilt afterwards from a complete image of the drive.
Ten years, one cable, never moved, then CRC errors and a drive taking the blame for a connector. Salt in the air speeds it up. Ruling that out costs nothing, so it happens first.
A second internal drive faithfully copying the first, until a single power supply event takes out the pair. We recover both, and the backup arrangement gets a quiet word afterwards.
SATA power connectors are shaped to mate in a set order. Push one in at an angle with the machine live and voltage arrives where it should not. The board dies on the spot. Standard answer: repair the board, move the ROM over, and it normally works.
Grain dust, damp winters, and now and again a mouse in an unheated outbuilding. No data sheet allows for any of that. Dust packs the breather filter, chewed cables short something out, condensation completes the job. The drives themselves survive far more of that than anybody expects.
With no free space to work in, NTFS turns brittle. The master file table cannot extend properly, updates land wherever they fit, and a single bad shutdown scatters the structure. Fully rebuildable from an image, and fully avoidable by keeping some space free.
Granite holds the cold, and an unheated outbuilding up here manages two attacks at once. Every swing in temperature puts condensation on the boards, and salt in the air keeps it working away. Corrosion lands on electronics, never on platters, so the data normally survives intact once the board has been repaired, or replaced with its ROM moved over.
A tower is the easiest machine in this trade to help. Side panel off. Two screws. Unclip the SATA and power leads. The disk is ready for an envelope. All-in-ones are laptops stood on end behind a sheet of glass, and a few of them fight back, so ring before levering rather than after. The weather here contributes its own category of work. Long overhead runs across open Aberdeenshire farmland take a winter storm head-on. Rural single-phase supplies then hand a fair share of it to whatever was plugged in at the time. And the hard restart after a cut does more harm than the cut did. Disks out of either situation recover far more often than their owners expect, provided nobody has plugged one back in to see whether it still works. That single act writes off more surge-damaged drives than the surge. Computer data repair Scotland wide is largely this: machines switched on one time too many.
A slow machine goes in to be looked at and comes home fast and empty, the documents having left with the previous installation. That story arrives most weeks and it is far less final than it sounds. An installer touches a modest fraction of the surface. The bulk of what was there before still sits beneath the new Windows, unreferenced and perfectly readable. Ordinary use is what eats into it. Every hour of browsing, updating and installing drops something fresh on top. The useful move is to stop now instead of at the weekend, pull the disk, and let the carve bring back whatever the installer never reached. A quick format by mistake is a smaller version of the same event and behaves the same way.
Everything in this workshop stands behind a desktop drive, and the legacy rack catches whatever the older towers arrive holding:
Firmware access for anything a tower might contain, of any age, any capacity and any habits on the bus.
Unsteady drives get captured under hardware retry control, rather than handed to a hopeful software loop for the night.
A clicking tower drive gets a donor head assembly fitted under filtered air, with the part pulled from catalogued stock and matched on model plus firmware family.
IDE and PATA, SCSI, early SATA. Retired family machines going back twenty years remain readable in this building, and that rack earns its space every single month.
A full capture on imaging hardware comes first. Everything afterwards runs against that copy. The original sits still and is asked for nothing more.
From booking in onwards the drive is read-only in hardware. Nothing in this process is able to write to customer media, by design rather than by policy.
OptiPlex estates out of offices and industrial units. Workstations grinding through survey and seismic work. Gaming rigs assembled on somebody's kitchen table. The tower that has driven the printer without fuss since 2014. Take the side off any of them and you generally find one of three things: a WD10EZEX, a BarraCuda ST1000DM010, or a P300 HDWD110. Between them sits most of the clicking on this page, and most of the surge damage too. WD_BLACK and Exos units come out of the heavier machines with genuine hours on the counter. All-in-ones are counted as desktops here, even though the hardware behind that glass is laptop from front to back.
The iMedia was, in its time, the family computer people picked up along with the shopping, and its disks reach us by two routes. Either bolted inside a tower that has given up starting, or loose in a drawer under a label reading important, probably. Its classic self-inflicted wound comes from a factory restore, run in the hope of curing a slow machine, burying years of photographs under a brand-new Windows. Almost all of it survives below, and a single complete sector image brings it back. Older IDE and early SATA mechanisms connect through the legacy rack, then get imaged at whatever unhurried pace suits their age.
The booking sheet stays comfortably full on Pavilions from spare rooms and OptiPlex estates from offices, with the occasional Presario-era Compaq in among them, often arriving once a recovery-disk reinstall has buried the documents it was supposed to safeguard. One full sector image reverses all of that. Decommissioned drives follow their own arc: shelved during a clear-out, wanted years afterwards for the accounts held on them, and by then unwilling to turn after so long at rest. Home towers come in after a storm carried off the power supply along with the drive electronics, or when Windows stops dead at its logo with bad sectors spreading beneath it. Post the bare drive on its own. We image it first, repair whatever needs repairing, and return your data on fresh media.
The drive has to be out of the machine before it travels, and only the bare drive. Not sure how? Ring 0800 689 0668 and someone will talk it through, or any computer shop will have it out in ten minutes for a few pounds.
Side panel, two screws, two leads, and the bare drive travels on its own. Getting it loose is your end of the work rather than ours. Post it tracked and insured, book your own courier, or bring it to reception at our Edinburgh location, Edinburgh Data Recovery, 4 Redheughs Rigg, Westpoint, South Gyle, Edinburgh EH12 9DQ, open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm. Reckon on 130 miles and two and a half hours down the A90; tracked post from Aberdeen lands the next working day. Nothing is collected from here. Leave the tower where it stands, keep the postage cheap, and note that a drive travels considerably better outside a case than inside one.
Nearly everything on this bench came by tracked, insured post. It is the safest way to shift a failing drive, and a parcel handed in at a North-East post office is usually here the next working day.
Still bolted into a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR box? Get the hard drive or SSD out first. The bare drive travels on its own. Stripping machines down is not a job this lab takes on. Flash soldered to a motherboard, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a couple of very thin laptops, is our one flat no: if it will not unbolt, it cannot be worked on.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it for the attention of Edinburgh Data Recovery. From Aberdeen that is roughly 130 miles and two and a half hours down the A90, or next working day by tracked post if you would rather not make the run. You get a call the moment it is booked onto the bench.
Not sure what belongs in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or work through the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, one number written down, no fix no fee on the bulk of jobs. Start online or phone it in.