Every family’s photo collection is stored somewhere in a “tower,” and every small business keeps its financial records in a workstation. However, when the equipment fails, the disk inside has usually survived. As such, from a study in Acomb to a back room in Clifton Moor, there are only two screws and two cables separating your desktop (and all its information) from an envelope heading to the bench.
All desktop computer jobs are diagnosed for free. This includes a fixed, written quote before the first screw is loosened.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Chip level, electronic and mechanical repair is charged at 50% at start-up, and the other 50% only upon successful recovery of your data; all BitLocker, ransomware, forensic and CCTV/DVR recoveries are charged at start-up when you accept our fixed quote. More information can be found on the data recovery cost page.
The first thing done to any desktop computer is correlating the complaints (symptoms) against the cause (fault). After twenty-plus years, these 25 account for almost everything coming into the workshop.
Whether it's a sick disk or broken system files, the documents leave via an image of the failing drive, rather than via a failing Windows operating system.
Failure of mechanical components, with noises to match. Any additional attempt to start it up again is essentially borrowing from the platters, at an unfavourable interest rate.
PSU and drive electronics damaged in a single shot. A board repair along with a ROM carry-over brings it back into play.
Dropped off the bus from a firmware fault, dead electronics or a bad connection. Every type of problem leaves its fingerprint. The rig will read these.
Windows was installed very recently. It sits lightly over the older data, until you continue using the computer. Switch it off and the probabilities stop changing.
All gone. Shift Delete and it's gone. It stays recoverable as long as the freed space hasn't been reused, so pull the plug today!
Spreading bad sectors and, mid thought, everything freezes. Imaging hardware gets around the bad sectors instead of fighting them.
When drives from encrypted desktops reach the isolated rig, it is always shadow copies and leftovers first. Panic is never part of that.
A striped pair means there are double the amount of failure modes. Both disk images will be complete before anyone does any maths.
Retired towers with IDE and SCSI hard drives, holding the only copy of the data from 2004. Our legacy adapters have never left the shelf.
Clicking DM008-era Barracudas are the house tower clickers. Donor heads go on at the head-swap bench, then the drive is cloned carefully.
WD20EARZ boards die when the lights flicker. We match the donor PCB, move the ROM across (sorted by the end of the week).
An AIO is basically a laptop that looks like a monitor: harder to open, but just as recoverable once the storage is out.
Old boxes of decommissioned disks that have sat in the dark for years often won't spin when you finally need them. We image them carefully, with mechanical issues factored into pricing from day one.
Inside of a week, mixed modular power supply cables and casual static kill drives. Then electronics repair brings them back, humbled.
The HDWD120 is the home builder's habit, and as such we keep a donor slot permanently open for its head wear cases.
If an X300 is slightly jostled while the screws holding the mounting bracket are loose, it will start making a clicking noise within a few days. Once new heads are installed, the surface is imaged around the bruise.
The components in a felt lined case run hot for thousands of silent hours, and the wear problems all turn up together.
Most new tower units boot from modules which can fail in an instant just like any hard drive. The NVMe section of our workshop will take care of them.
WD BLACK and Gold drives in render machines go through extreme cycle after cycle until they start to falter. If either one fails, the imaging job is scheduled around whichever heads are weakest.
In rural areas a sagging power supply corrupts writes bit by bit, a market-town speciality out this way. We rebuild the entire file system off a full image.
Aggressive head parking can log well over six figures worth of load counts and wear out the ramp long before the disks would even start to get tired. The disk image is completed before the load counter climbs further.
One cable, ten years and no movement, and yet CRC (cyclic redundancy check) errors get the drive blamed for an issue with the connection. We diagnose first to make sure nothing drastic is done impulsively.
The second internal drive was faithfully mirroring the first internal drive until a single PSU (power supply unit) fault took out both drives. Both were successfully recovered; however, the backup strategy received a very mild critique.
The drive came out of an older PC and never made it into the newer one; the floor was the last place it saw action. The heads were damaged without any computer involved; nonetheless, it still needed head-swap bench repair.
You can't find an easier customer than a tower: simply remove the side panel, undo two screws, disconnect the SATA and power cables and, once you have your quote, the hard drive is ready for the post. An all-in-one unit is really a laptop placed vertically behind its monitor, and some units will not budge easily, so ring first if yours has been glued together. York also has an issue most cities don't, namely, when the River Ouse rises and the cellars around the Foss confluence flood, the computers stored down there go under with them. Flooded drives are recoverable much more often than their owners typically believe; however, it only works if the drive remains unpowered. If you plug in a flooded drive to test if it is still working properly, you are essentially sealing its fate and killing it permanently.
A slow computer goes in for a service somewhere and comes back like new, but without any of the customer's previous documents. We are told that this happens at least once a week. Fortunately a reinstallation only writes over part of the disk. There remains a large amount of the old data still present “underneath” the new Windows, although each subsequent hour the computer operates will continue to eat away at it. Please turn off the machine today, get a quote either by calling us on 0800 689 0668 or via our free online diagnostic before sending your hard drive, and we can retrieve whatever the installer never reached.
A desktop's drive receives the full force of the entire workshop. The legacy shelf, however, receives whatever the old towers send to it.
Gaining firmware access to any drive that may be located within a tower regardless of age, capacity or interface.
If a desktop drive becomes unstable during the extraction/recovery process, we switch to using hardware retry control as opposed to leaving the data recovery process hanging in an endless software loop.
Tower drives with clicking heads have donor head assemblies installed at the head-swap bench using parts obtained from a catalogued inventory.
This building can still read storage from two decades of retired family machines, including IDE and PATA (Parallel ATA), SCSI, and first generation SATA.
We take the initial step of creating a full image of data using imaging hardware. Once we create that initial image, we can work solely off of that image for recovery purposes while keeping the original device intact.
Once booked into our workshop, all drives are treated as physically read-only. We do not perform any operation that would write data back onto any customer media.
All OptiPlex towers from the retail park office locations, gaming rigs and the tower that has been managing the printer since 2014: when you break open one of these systems it is usually going to be either a DM008 Barracuda, a WD20EARZ Blue or an HDWD120 P300 hard disk. These three models account for most of the click and surge tickets reported on this page. All-in-ones count as desktops here, even though they contain virtually nothing but laptop components.
The iMedia was the typical supermarket family computer of its time. The disks come to us from one of two places: pulled from a system that will no longer boot, or out of a drawer labelled "important, probably". The classic self-inflicted damage is applying a factory restore to resolve slow performance. This reinstalls the operating system and buries all of the photographs taken over the years. Virtually all of that data survives below and can be recovered through a complete sector image. Older IDE and early SATA drives connect via the legacy shelf and image at a speed in keeping with their age.
Spare room Pavilions and office OptiPlex estates keep the booking sheet full, with Presario-era Compaq desktops still coming in, often after a recovery disk reinstall buried the very records it was supposed to keep safe; these are restored via a full sector image. The story of decommissioned drives follows its own curve. A hard disk was put into storage as part of an office clear-out and wanted years later because it held the company accounts; however, after sitting idle for so long, it will no longer turn over. Home towers arrive when a severe storm takes out both the power supply unit and the drive electronics, or when Windows stops at the logo screen above a large number of bad sectors. Once you have your quote, post the bare drive only (not installed). It will be imaged, repaired as needed, and then the data will come back to you on new media.
First get a quote via the free online diagnostic, or ring our team on the telephone. Then remove the drive from your PC before you send it in. If unsure, please ring us on 0800 689 0668, and one of our staff will guide you through this process, or alternatively any local computer shop should be able to do it for a minimal fee.
Take the side panel off, remove a few screws, unplug a couple of leads. Then, once you have your quote, you can post the bare hard drive on its own (taking it out is a job for your end). This way you keep the tower at home, postage costs stay low and, honestly, the hard drive travels safer outside of the computer tower than inside.
Get a quote first, by calling us on 0800 689 0668 or using our free online diagnostic tool. After receiving your quote, tracked and insured post is how nearly every job reaches us: it is the fastest and safest way to get your drive to our lab in Leeds. There's no collection service, so the parcel is yours to send, or you can hand it in at the Leeds lab's reception.
Is the hard drive or SSD still inside a machine, such as a laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV/DVR system or server? Please remove the hard drive or SSD from the machine first and then post just the bare drive by itself; we do not provide a service for removing drives from devices. For a server or RAID, send every disk, each clearly marked with its bay. For a NAS, send its disks labelled by bay if you can remove them, otherwise send the NAS itself. We cannot work on storage soldered to the motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs, T2 Macs and certain slim laptops): if it doesn't come out, it can't come in. If you are unsure whether your storage is removable, call us before sending.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Once you have your quote, send your package addressed to Leeds Data Recovery (about a 40 minute drive from York on the A64 & A1(M) or next working day if you want to send it using trackable post). We will contact you as soon as we have taken delivery of your package and put it in line to be worked upon.
Can't figure out what to pack? Ring 0800 689 0668 first, or try our free online diagnostic tool.
Free diagnosis, fixed written quote, and on most work you only pay if we recover your data. Start online or call our freephone.