Every family's photo archive lives in a tower somewhere; every small firm's accounts live in a workstation — and when the machine gives up, the disk inside it very rarely has. From a study in Acomb or a back office at Clifton Moor, it's two screws and two cables between you and an envelope to the bench.
Every desktop computer job is diagnosed free. The quote turns up fixed, in writing, before a screwdriver is lifted.
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 putting the symptoms against the fault — after twenty-odd years, these twenty-five account for nearly everything that comes through the door.
Sick disk or broken system files — either way, the documents exit through an image of the drive, not through the ailing Windows.
Mechanical failure with commentary. Every further restart is a loan taken out against the platters, at an unkind rate.
PSU and drive electronics burnt in one strike. Board repair plus a ROM carry-over reopens the conversation.
Off the bus via firmware fault, dead electronics or a tired connection. Each cause leaves its own fingerprints; the rig reads them.
A fresh Windows sits lightly on old data — until the machine keeps getting used. Switch it off and the odds freeze where they are.
Shift-Delete and all. Recoverable while freed space goes unclaimed — a fine argument for pulling the plug today.
Spreading bad sectors freeze everything mid-thought. Imaging hardware simply steps around the rot rather than quarrelling with it.
Encrypted desktops go to the isolated rig: shadow copies and leftovers first, panic nowhere in the process.
A striped pair means twice the ways to fail. Both members image completely before anyone does arithmetic.
Retired towers with IDE and SCSI disks and the only copy of 2004. Our legacy adapters have never once left the shelf.
DM008-era Barracudas are the resident clickers of household towers. Donor heads under the hood, then a careful clone.
The WD20EARZ loses its board when the lights flicker. Matched donor PCB, ROM moved across, sorted within the week.
An AIO is a laptop wearing a monitor costume — stiffer to open, identical to recover once the storage is free.
Decommissioned disks boxed for years decline to spin when finally needed. Imaged gently with motor trouble priced in from the start.
Mixed modular PSU cables and casual static kill drives inside a week. Electronics repair returns them, humbler.
The HDWD120 is the home-builder's habit, and its head-wear cases keep a donor slot permanently reserved.
An X300 nudged with mounting screws loose starts clicking days after. Fresh heads, then the surface imaged around the bruise.
A felt-lined case runs everything hot for thousands of quiet hours, and the wear invoices all arrive together.
New towers boot from a module that can quit as suddenly as any drive. The NVMe side of the workshop takes those.
WD_BLACK and Gold drives in render boxes log brutal cycles. When they stumble, imaging gets scheduled around whichever heads are weakest.
Sagging rural supply corrupts writes by degrees — a market-town speciality out this way. The file system is rebuilt from a full image.
Aggressive head-parking racks up six-figure load counts and wears the ramp long before the platters tire. Imaged before the counter climbs further.
Ten years, one cable, zero movement — then CRC errors get the drive blamed for a connector's sins. We diagnose before anyone does anything drastic.
A second internal drive dutifully mirroring — until one PSU event collects the pair. Both get recovered; the strategy gets a gentle word.
Out of the old machine, never reached the new one; the floor intervened. Head damage with no computer involved — hood work all the same.
A tower is the easiest patient in the trade: open the side, undo two screws, pull the SATA and power leads, and the drive is ready for the post. An all-in-one is really a laptop stood upright behind its screen, and some are stubborn about opening — ring first if yours is the glued sort. York adds a hazard most cities don't get, too: when the Ouse comes up and the cellars around the Foss confluence flood, the PCs stored down there go under with them. A drowned drive is recoverable far more often than owners expect — but only if it stays unpowered. Plugging in a flood victim to 'see if it's alright' is the one move that reliably finishes it.
A slow PC goes in for a service somewhere, comes back factory-fresh, and the documents went with the old install — we hear that one weekly. The saving grace: a reinstall only rewrites part of the surface, and underneath the fresh Windows the bulk of the old data is still sat in place, untouched. Each additional hour of use eats into it, mind. Power the machine off today, send the drive, and the carve pulls back whatever the installer never reached.
A desktop's drive gets the whole weight of the workshop, and the legacy shelf catches whatever the old towers send:
Firmware access for anything a tower might hold, whatever its age, capacity or interface habits.
Unsteady desktop drives get captured entirely under hardware retry control instead of being left to an optimistic software loop.
Clicking tower drives take donor head assemblies under the filtered hood, parts drawn from catalogued stock.
IDE and PATA, SCSI, first-generation SATA — two decades of retired family machines stay readable in this building.
Complete capture on imaging hardware comes first; recovery afterwards works entirely on that copy while the original rests.
From booking-in onward the drive is physically read-only. No step in this workshop writes to customer media.
OptiPlex estates from the retail-park offices, gaming rigs, and the tower that's minded the printer since 2014 — crack them open and it's nearly always a DM008 Barracuda, a WD20EARZ Blue or an HDWD120 P300 inside, three drives that between them raise most of this page's clicking and surge tickets. All-in-ones count as desktops here, even though everything behind the glass is laptop through and through.
The iMedia was its era's supermarket family computer, and its disks reach us two ways: still fastened inside a tower that gave up starting, or bare in a drawer labelled 'important, probably'. The classic self-inflicted injury remains the factory restore applied to cure sluggishness, entombing years of photographs beneath a new Windows — nearly all of it survives below and lifts out through a complete sector image. Elderly IDE and early SATA mechanisms connect via the legacy shelf and image at the gentle pace their years have earned.
Spare-room Pavilions and office OptiPlex estates keep the booking sheet full, with Presario-era Compaqs still trailing in behind — frequently after a recovery-disk reinstall interred the very documents it promised to spare, all reversible from a full sector image. Decommission stories follow their own arc: a drive shelved in an office clear-out, wanted years on for its accounts, now refusing to spin after the long sleep. Home towers arrive when a storm claims PSU and drive electronics together, or when Windows halts at its logo atop a field of bad sectors. Post the bare drive only — it gets imaged first, repaired where needed, and the data comes home on fresh media.
Take the drive out of the machine before sending it over to us. Not sure how? Ring 0800 689 0668 and we'll point you right — or any local computer shop will have it out for a small charge.
Side panel off, a couple of screws, two leads unplugged — then post the bare drive alone, since extraction is a your-end job. The tower stays home, postage stays small, and honestly the drive rides safer out of the case than in it.
Nearly every job on our bench arrived by tracked, insured post — it's the quickest, safest route in. There's no collection service, so the parcel is yours to send or hand in.
Is the drive still inside a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Take the hard drive or SSD out first and post the bare drive on its own — removing drives from machines isn't a service we offer. Storage that's soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, certain slim laptops) is the one thing we can't work on: if it doesn't come out, it can't come in.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Address the parcel for the attention of Leeds Data Recovery — about 40 minutes from York via the A64 and A1(M), or next working day by tracked post. You'll hear from us the moment it's booked onto the bench.
Not certain what to pack? Ring 0800 689 0668 first, or run the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, a fixed written figure, no fix no fee on most work — start online or ring the freephone.