Laptops know when to pick their moment. Dead on the morning a tender closes. Locked in a loop of restarting on the night the photographs were finally going somewhere safe. Wearing a mug of tea by nine. The laptop itself may be past saving. What is inside it, on this bench, typically isn't, and that's where your work lives.
Each laptop job is examined at no cost. You will receive a fixed figure in writing prior to any tools coming out.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. The exceptions are electronic/mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and forensic jobs. All pricing information can be found on the data recovery cost page.
Our first job is to identify what fault is causing your symptoms with your laptop. With over twenty years of experience, we know these twenty-five cover almost every fault that reaches our bench.
If you are experiencing a dead laptop (no power), there is likely a problem with either the logic board or the charging circuit. In most cases, your files remain intact and do not know about the damage done to your laptop. This is a bad time for your laptop; however, this is a normal week for your files.
Corrosion is typically measured by days. If you remove the drive as soon as possible after it has been damaged, it generally comes away clean. However, if you leave it in the laptop for two weeks (or longer), it is subjected to chemical reactions, and like all other chemical reactions, they do not stop until completed.
When you dropped your laptop, platters inside the hard drive were spinning. When the computer crashed to the ground, the heads absorbed the shock. Unfortunately, donor work will be required. If you try to turn on your laptop again at home, you risk damaging the platters further with each attempt.
There are two possibilities here: either your hard drive failed or you had problems with your Windows installation. The end result is the same either way. We take your data off the hard drive while it sits on our bench. We do not extract your data using an operating system that is unreliable.
The system crashed but all of your documents remain safe. As jobs on this page go, this one is a gentle one, as long as the disk underneath tells us the truth about itself when we check it.
Not even a whine from the machine, just one boot error in the morning. That is how today's storage systems fail. Just pull the M.2 card out and it goes over to our flash bench, where it will be treated like every other SSD.
Fans blocked by dust and vents clogged with fluff cause some heat to build up in the drive bay every day. While it may seem minor, this type of wear can add up quickly. Get your important data backed up off your device before the heat finishes the job.
The panel has gone, however, the rest of the computer works fine. Laptop does not function properly; however, the drive is completely fine. Unscrew the drive at your location. It images here without issues.
Someone else was trying to recover the files and they deleted the user accounts. When we start recovery, we go through the areas of the disk that were not accessed by the installer, and on most drives this typically encompasses most of the disk surface.
If you send us the key or password with the drive, the recovery process will continue as normal. Let us know when you call and there should be no delays. Do not provide either and the job will stop immediately at the worst time.
The boot message you're seeing indicates that the drive has written an "obituary" regarding its own demise. Shut down the computer and remove the drive. Keep your old laptop for parts if anyone still wants to use anything else from it.
Toshiba's ubiquitous drive does not fail cleanly; instead, it slows, and eventually will read data (if it even tries) in fits and starts, with the eventual tick of death. This is precisely why imaging systems always leave the weakest heads until last to capture.
USB-C wall adapters by unbranded manufacturers send spikes onto motherboard traces, as well as sometimes directly into the electronic circuitry on drives. Both are familiar ground in our workshop, and neither of these issues is difficult to repair.
The cell expands and applies pressure upon whatever is located above it, typically the actual storage system in a good many designs. Stop charging your device today. Remove the drive within a week. Not the other way around.
An SN570 or SN770 can appear during start-up and disappear upon subsequent start-ups. Once removed from the machine, placed into service mode and powered up, most often there is much to tell.
Faulty intermittent DC ports damage file tables piece by piece over time, as opposed to completely destroying them at once. The machine becomes increasingly strange over weeks prior to total failure. Your volume is rebuilt using a full image.
The new SSD was only partly populated, and the old drive was completely wiped and ready to sell. But then reality hit somewhere in-between the new SSD and the old drive. So we work beneath the wipe on the old drive, and the less people touch it, the more comes back.
When you squeeze an ultrabook's lid down it causes stress in the board, and at some point the solder joint(s) underneath the module will give. If your module unplugs, we'll reflow it under our inspection scope and then image it on the flash bench using our standard methods; however, storage soldered to the board is not taken on (if you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first).
Windows can't find where the user account is stored and therefore displays an empty desktop instead. However, the actual folders didn't move. We'll take them from the disk directly and avoid negotiating with Windows.
Small soldered chips degrade and fail for the same reasons all other flash memory wears out. Straight answer, again: soldered storage is outside of what we take on. We'd rather inform you of this before you pay to post your item to us than let you find this out when you've already sent it. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
In some build configurations, a small fast SSD (solid-state drive) is paired with an HDD (spinning hard disk), and the two are presented together as a single drive by Windows. When the small module is lost, all of the pairing data for the two drives goes along with it, so when something attempts to read from the larger disk, it will either appear blank or will be seen as unformatted. We image both the SSD and the large disk, and the "link" created by pairing them in Windows is then unpicked in software.
Cloning software designed for consumer use gets pointed at a failing disk, tries every bad sector for hours, and leaves the disk in a lot poorer condition than when it started. We are able to recover from whatever is remaining. There is usually more left to recover from than the customer has been informed of.
Standard internet advice after a spill does two things that are not helpful. The first is that it keeps the liquid in place where it will continue to corrode. The second is that it will cause moisture to go deeper into the connectors. Having your drive out and posted, once you have a quote, is better than any amount of drying. Day one is better than day ten.
By default, Windows never fully closes down. Instead of closing its system files it hibernates them, then loads the hibernated files when you next start your computer. If you cut off power while it is hibernating or if you access the hard drive from another computer, the file system structures end up depicting a moment which no longer exists. They can be rebuilt from an image, but not on the live disk.
That retaining screw is teeny and it has a tendency to disappear during upgrades much more frequently than people will admit. The module sits at an angle when this occurs and connects intermittently. It will drop out mid-write; that looks like a "dying drive" condition which it isn't. The free diagnostic tells these two conditions apart from one another, prior to you spending money.
Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, MSI, Framework, Surface. There isn't much difference in how the job is done; there is only one critical item to get: whatever sits behind the base plate (a 2.5-inch disk or an M.2 module). Removing the panel is your part of the deal. Nothing is dismantled at this end, and any PC repair shop in town would remove a drive for a small fee if using screwdrivers wasn't your thing. Get a price quote before sending your drive, via telephone call or through our free online diagnostic. Then just send us the bare drive. Everything else remains at home. A serious cautionary note is warranted. Plenty of ultra-slim laptops have their drives soldered directly onto the motherboard. Soldered components are out of scope for this bench. If you're unsure about whether or not your laptop falls into this category, please dial 0800 689 0668 with your laptop's model number. This may take but a minute to sort out, and it also saves you unscrewing anything. Laptop data recovery represents the largest single category of jobs submitted to us by volume and most of these arrive as a bare drive contained in a jiffy bag.
A fall does not always mark the casing but can certainly dislodge the heads and drop them onto the platter. A machine that clicks, or hangs at the maker's logo after a knock, should have the power switched off and remain in that state. It is the second and third attempts that turn an otherwise fixable disk drive into scrap. Liquid is different from a mechanical failure. Once liquid comes into contact with the internal components of a device, it starts a corrosion time clock. Folk remedy methods are no match against this clock as they inevitably fail. For example, placing rice near a spilled substance will absorb moisture from the air. However, it will do nothing to remove or clean the spill. A radiator heats the residue causing it to dry into place. Powering the device up to see if it still functions properly is responsible for a good number of the genuine write-offs that reach us. Pull the storage fast, or give the machine to someone else who will. In either case, you keep the odds in your favour. Cold also plays a role up here; when a laptop is brought in from a van where it has been sitting outside at minus four and immediately opened in an office where it is warm, water vapour inside the computer condenses. Therefore, ten minutes of patience may be worth more than any amount of drying tricks.
Laptops can hold almost any type of storage device created over the past twenty years. Therefore, nothing here on the bench is limited to just one type:
We log it on arrival, handle it while grounded, image it fully prior to starting proper recovery. No one's timeline changes this order; if this order gets broken, that is when the disks disappear.
We work with M.2 in both SATA and NVMe. We also work with mSATA, along with the shorter 2242 and 2230 modules, and Apple blades. And for laptops older than all of this we provide IDE. Whatever storage the laptop was carrying receives a native connection.
A laptop drive will be treated at the firmware level with no difference than a server machine. All are full jobs regardless of size.
Each dropped machine means a new head swap. Each head swap uses donor units matched from racked inventory (rather than the next available "look alike").
If an item takes a spill, then it receives corrosion treatment followed by time in the ultrasonic tank to restore board and connector functionality. Imaging will begin after that, not prior to it.
Read-only capabilities are locked into hardware from the moment of initial contact. There is not one single device on this bench capable of writing to any customers' storage devices.
Fleet ThinkPads and EliteBooks from the offices at Altens and Tullos, as well as the units located around Dyce and the heliport. Gaming MSIs from students living in flats surrounding both universities. The family Pavilion that has been doing its job for years in a back bedroom. All of these systems contain a drive of the MQ01ABD100 or WD10SPZX class, or a module of the SN570 or SN770 class, and both have pages of their own on this website. It's not the system we want, it is the bare drive or the bare module. There are two boundaries, each clearly stated and once: nothing soldered onto a board (if you're not sure which kind you have, contact us first), and no phones or tablets at all.
Fujitsu ended sales of their laptops in this market many years ago, yet Lifebooks out of office fleets and Amilos out of box rooms continue to arrive. The vast majority are filled with a decade's worth of documents, stored in no second place. These Fujitsu 2.5-inch drives have an ageing process that follows a predictable timetable. At first, the firmware gets stuck. Next, the heads get tired and then, eventually, the sectors become damaged in groups. Get a quote first, by either telephone or the free online diagnostic. Once you know how much it costs, remove the drive from your laptop and post it to us, or drop it off at our Edinburgh lab (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, no appointment needed). After receiving your hard drive we will perform a straightforward mechanical recovery: fragile areas last, and donor heads introduced only when a real head failure has occurred. Your laptop can stay on a shelf at home for the whole job.
A failed M.2-based modern VivoBook or ZenBook does not make much of a racket. The M.2 module fails, the computer says it cannot find a bootable device, and all of your data are stuck in NAND waiting for either a service mode session or a read at chip level. Satellite laptops from Toshiba make far more noise. MQ-generation hard drives like the MQ01ABD100 wear out their heads. They will get slower and eventually start making ticking sounds if you push them enough. Both types end up on the same workbenches where we receive the drive or module, take an image and send your files back home. We turn away machines with the storage soldered onto the motherboard (usually these are the thinnest), since we can't honestly make a promise about those. If you're not sure which kind you have, call us first so we can determine whether yours has a removable module.
Before it travels, your drive has to be removed from the machine, and only the bare drive is sent. Don't know what to do? Give us a ring on 0800 689 0668 and we'll go through it with you, or take it into any computer shop and they'll have it out in ten minutes for a few pounds.
Dismantling machines is not something we do, so the drive or M.2 module has to be removed before it travels. This usually requires removal of the base panel and six screws. If you'd rather not take your laptop apart, a local repair shop in town will remove it for you at an affordable price. The bare unit should then be placed in an anti-static bag (or as a last resort in some form of kitchen foil). Get a quote first, by phone or with the free online diagnostic, then send it on its own via tracked and insured post, a courier booked by yourself, or hand it in at reception at our Edinburgh location (Edinburgh Data Recovery, 4 Redheughs Rigg, Westpoint, South Gyle, Edinburgh EH12 9DQ), which is open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, with no appointment needed, about two and a half hours down the A90 from Aberdeen. Nothing gets collected from here, so that leg is yours to arrange. Storage soldered onto the board itself is beyond us, and so are phones and tablets; if you're not sure which kind you have, please call us prior to sending anything.
Get a quote first by telephone or use our free online diagnostic. Most of what you see on this bench will then be delivered via tracked, insured post. This is one of the safest ways to move a failing drive and packages handed in at a North-East post office are normally delivered here the next working day.
Still attached to a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV/DVR unit? Remove the hard drive or SSD first. The bare drive travels on its own; when removing disks from a server remove all the disks and label each disk by its bay. This lab does not take machines apart. Any storage that has been soldered onto a motherboard (as in T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and a couple of thin laptops) will not be worked on: if it will not unbolt, we cannot work on it. If you're not sure what type of machine you have, ring us first. Phones and tablets are also not taken on.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Your parcel should be addressed to Edinburgh Data Recovery, approximately two and a half hours (and 130 miles) from Aberdeen via the A90; alternatively it can reach us the next working day by tracked post if this journey time / distance is prohibitive to travel. As soon as your drive has been scheduled in we will contact you.
Still unsure about what should be placed inside of the packaging? Please call us first on 0800 689 0668, or use our free online diagnostic tool to assist you in deciding which items belong inside of the packaging before sealing.
Free diagnosis, one fixed price quoted in writing, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start online or phone it in.