Laptops choose their moment. Dead on the morning a tender closes. Locked in a restart loop the night the photographs were finally going somewhere safe. Wearing a mug of tea by nine. The machine itself may well be beyond saving. What is inside it, on this bench, usually is not — and that is where your work lives.
Every laptop 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 laptop is matching the symptom to the fault. Twenty-odd years in, these twenty-five cover nearly every one that reaches this bench.
Either the board or the charging circuit has died. The storage was not involved and does not know about it. Bad week for the laptop. Perfectly ordinary week for your files.
Corrosion works to a schedule counted in days. Pull the storage out early and it generally walks away clean. Leave it in the chassis for a fortnight and it is up against chemistry, which does not tire.
Platters were turning when the machine hit the floor, and the head stack absorbed it. Donor work in filtered air is the route. Switching it back on at home is not, because each attempt costs surface.
Could be a failing disk, could be a wrecked Windows install. The exit is identical either way. Your files come off the drive on our benches. They do not come out through an operating system nobody can trust.
System wrecked, documents intact. As jobs on this page go, a gentle one, provided the disk underneath tells the truth about its own condition when we test it.
No noise, no warning, one boot error in the morning. This is how storage fails now. Take the M.2 module out, move it across to the flash bench, and treat it exactly as any other solid-state case.
Blocked fans and felted vents roast the drive bay a little each evening. The wear is cumulative and it is real. Lift the data clear before the heat finishes what it started.
Panel gone, everything else fine, laptop useless, drive perfectly healthy. Unscrew the drive at your end. It images at ours without complications of any kind.
Somebody else's rescue attempt flattened the user accounts. We work through the regions that installer never reached, and on most disks that means the large majority of the surface.
Recovery proceeds normally when the key or the password travels with the drive. Say so when you first ring and nothing gets held up. Omit it and the job stops dead at the worst possible point.
That boot message is the drive dictating its own obituary. Power the machine down and unscrew the drive. Keep the laptop for parts if anybody still wants them.
Toshiba's everywhere-drive does not stop cleanly. It slows, then reads unevenly, then ticks. Imaging leaves the weakest head until last, which is precisely what imaging hardware exists to do.
Unbranded USB-C bricks put spikes into boards, and occasionally into the drive electronics sitting behind them. Both faults are well trodden ground in this workshop, and neither is complicated to put right.
The cell expands and pushes against whatever sits above it, which in a good many designs is the storage itself. Stop charging the machine today. Get the drive out this week. That sequence, not the other one.
An SN570 or SN770 can be present at shutdown and missing at the next start-up. Out of the machine it comes, into service mode it goes, and it usually turns out to have plenty to say.
Intermittent DC jacks damage file tables in instalments rather than all at once, so the machine grows stranger for weeks before it quits altogether. A full image is what the volume gets rebuilt from.
New SSD only part populated, old drive already wiped ready for sale, and the realisation landing somewhere between the two. We work beneath the wipe on the original, and the less anybody touches it the more comes back.
Squeeze an ultrabook lid and the load goes into the board. Solder joints beneath the module are what give way. Reflowed under the scope, then imaged on the flash bench like anything else.
Windows has lost track of the account and offered an empty desktop as a substitute. The genuine folders have not moved anywhere. We lift them off the disk directly and skip the negotiation with Windows.
Small soldered chips wear out as any other flash does, and they fail in the same ways. Straight answer, as always: soldered storage falls outside what we take on, and hearing that now beats hearing it after you have paid postage.
Certain builds team a small fast module up with a spinning disk, then present the pair to Windows as one drive. Lose the small module and the pairing metadata goes with it, leaving the big disk looking blank or unformatted to everything that reads it. We image both halves and unpick the pairing in software.
Consumer cloning software gets pointed at a failing disk, retries every bad sector for hours, and leaves the drive materially worse than it started. We work with what remains, and there is normally more left than the owner has been told.
Standard internet advice after a spill achieves two unhelpful things. It keeps the liquid in place to carry on corroding, and it drives moisture deeper into the connectors. Getting the drive out and posted beats any amount of drying, and day one beats day ten.
By default Windows never truly shuts down. It hibernates its system files and resumes them at the next start. Cut the power in that state, or mount the disk from another system, and the structures end up describing a moment that no longer exists. Rebuildable from an image. Not on the live disk.
That retaining screw is tiny and it goes missing during upgrades far more often than anybody admits. The module ends up sitting at an angle, connecting on and off, dropping out mid-write. That presents as a dying drive and is nothing of the sort. Telling those two apart is what the free diagnostic does, before you spend anything.
Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, MSI, Framework, a Surface. The job does not change, because only one component matters: whatever sits behind the base panel, a 2.5-inch disk or an M.2 module. Getting that panel off is your end of the arrangement. Nothing is dismantled at this end, and any computer shop in town will free a drive for a few pounds if screwdrivers are not your line of work. Send the storage alone. The rest of the laptop stays at home. One warning is worth taking seriously. Plenty of slim ultrabooks have their memory soldered straight onto the mainboard, and soldered chips are outside what this bench can do. If you are not certain which kind you own, ring 0800 689 0668 with the model number. It takes a minute to settle and it saves you unscrewing anything. Laptop data recovery is the biggest single category here by volume, and nearly all of it arrives as a bare drive in a jiffy bag.
A fall can leave the casing unmarked and still drop the heads onto the platters. A machine that clicks or hangs at the maker's logo after a knock wants switching off and left that way. It is attempt two and attempt three that convert a repairable disk into scrap. Liquid behaves differently. A spill sets a corrosion clock running, and folk remedies lose that race without exception. Rice absorbs nothing useful. A radiator bakes the residue in place. And powering it up to see whether it still works is responsible for a good number of the genuine write-offs that reach us. Pull the storage fast. Or give the machine to somebody who will. Either way the odds stay in your favour. Cold has its own part to play up here: a laptop carried in from a van at minus four and opened straight away in a warm office will condense inside itself. Ten minutes of patience is worth more than any drying trick.
A laptop might be holding practically any storage format built in the last twenty years, so nothing on this bench is narrow:
Logged on arrival, handled grounded, imaged in full before recovery proper starts. Nobody's deadline changes that order, because breaking it is how drives go missing.
M.2 in both SATA and NVMe, mSATA, the short 2242 and 2230 modules, Apple blades, plus IDE for machines older than all of it. Whatever the laptop was carrying gets a native connection.
Laptop drives get the same firmware-level access as the server work. Small drive, full job, and it does not get handled as anything less.
Dropped machines mean head swaps, and head swaps happen in filtered air using donors matched from racked stock rather than whatever looked similar.
Anything that has taken a spill gets corrosion treatment and time in the ultrasonic tank until boards and connectors behave. Imaging begins after that, not before.
Read-only is enforced in hardware from first connection. No rig on this bench has the ability to write to a customer's drive.
Fleet ThinkPads and EliteBooks out of the offices at Altens and Tullos, and the units around Dyce and the heliport. Gaming MSIs from student flats near both universities. The family Pavilion still earning its keep in a back bedroom. Inside every one of them is a drive of the MQ01ABD100 or WD10SPZX class, or a module of the SN570 or SN770 class, and both have pages of their own here. The machine is not what we need. The bare drive or the bare module is. Two boundaries, given plainly and once: nothing soldered onto a board, and phones and tablets not at all.
Fujitsu stopped selling laptops here years ago, and Lifebooks out of office fleets and Amilos out of box rooms still keep arriving, generally carrying a decade of documents held in no second place. Their 2.5-inch drives age on a predictable timetable. Firmware hangs arrive first, then tired heads, then sector damage turning up in clusters. Unscrew the drive, post it, and what follows is straightforward mechanical recovery: fragile regions left until the end, donors introduced only where a head has genuinely died. Your laptop can stay on a shelf at home for the whole job.
There is nothing loud about a modern VivoBook or ZenBook failing. The M.2 module gives out, the machine reports that no boot device exists, and every file sits in the NAND awaiting either a service-mode session or a read at chip level. Toshiba's Satellite years make more noise. MQ-generation drives such as the MQ01ABD100 wear down their heads, slow to a shuffle, then tick when pushed. Both routes arrive at the same benches, where drive or module comes out, an image gets taken, and your files go home. We turn away only the thinnest machines with storage soldered down, because nobody can make an honest promise about those.
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.
Dismantling machines is not work done at this end, so the drive or M.2 module has to be out before it travels. On most laptops that means a base panel and six screws, and a repair shop in town will do it cheaply if you would sooner not. Anti-static bag for the bare unit, or kitchen foil at a push, and send that on its own. Choose between tracked and insured post, a courier you book yourself, or 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, about two and a half hours down the A90 from Aberdeen. Nothing gets collected from here, so that leg is yours to arrange. The single thing beyond us is storage soldered onto the board itself.
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.
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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.