Laptops pick their moments — dead the morning of the deadline, looping on the logo the night the photos were finally getting backed up, wearing a coffee at nine on a Monday. The machine is often finished; the drive inside it very rarely is. From student rooms at Heslington to home offices in Holgate and Acomb, the storage comes out, comes here, and the files come back.
Every laptop 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 laptop is putting the symptoms against the fault — after twenty-odd years, these twenty-five account for nearly everything that comes through the door.
Board or charging circuit down, drive inside untouched. A bad week for the laptop; a decent forecast for the data.
Corrosion works to a schedule of days. Storage pulled promptly nearly always escapes; storage left a fortnight fights chemistry, and chemistry's on form.
The spinning drive caught the landing with its heads. Donor work under the hood follows — home re-tests shouldn't.
Failing disk or broken Windows, the exit is identical: files leave via the drive on our rigs, never via the operating system.
System wrecked, documents fine. Among the gentler jobs on this page — assuming the disk beneath is honest.
No click, no drama, one boot error: the modern failure. The M.2 module comes out and crosses to the flash side.
Furred-up fans slow-roast the drive bay one film night at a time. We lift the data before the heat completes the job.
All systems go except the panel. The drive comes out at your end and images at ours without a murmur.
User accounts flattened by the rescue attempt. We mine the regions the installer never visited — customarily most of the disk.
Recovers normally provided the key or password comes too. Raise it in the first call and nothing stalls later.
A stiff hinge levers at the corner for months until the board yields. The storage lives elsewhere and never feels it.
That boot screen is the drive reading its own eulogy. Power off; post the drive; keep the laptop.
Free-fall sensors park heads when they win. Mid-write, they sometimes don't — and donor heads then settle accounts.
Toshiba's everywhere-drive fades into slow reads and soft ticking. Rigs image it weakest-head-last, which is exactly the point of rigs.
No-brand USB-C bricks spike boards and occasionally the drive electronics behind them. Both failures have worn paths to recovery here.
The swelling cell presses upward into whatever's above — often the storage. End the charging today; extract the drive this week.
Screen-first crush injuries rarely touch storage. We lift the drive from the wreck; it images as if nothing happened, because to it nothing did.
A SN770-class module can be present at shutdown and absent at boot. Out of the machine and into service mode it goes.
Heat soak through glass ages storage on the quiet; the read errors surface weeks after the weather does.
Random power loss corrupts file tables a little at a time. The volume is stood back up from a complete image.
Sleep mode that never slept, insulation doing its job all too well. The storage ages a year in an afternoon — imaged before there's a second afternoon.
New SSD half-populated, old drive wiped for resale, panic complete. We work under the wipe on the original — the sooner it stops being touched, the more comes back.
Ultrabook lids pass every squeeze through to the board, and the module's solder keeps score. Reflowed and imaged on the flash rigs.
Windows mislaid the account and offered an empty shell instead. The real folders are still on disk; we extract them directly rather than debate with the OS.
Small soldered chips wear like any flash and fail the same. Stated straight, as always: soldered storage sits beyond what we take on.
Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer, Asus, MSI, Surface — the lid badge changes nothing, because the part that matters is the 2.5-inch drive or M.2 module sat behind the base panel. That panel comes off at your end: we don't do the extraction ourselves, and any York repair shop will free the drive for the price of a coffee if screwdrivers aren't your thing. Post the bare drive on its own. One caution from long experience — some slim ultrabooks solder the storage to the motherboard, and soldered chips sit outside what we recover. Not sure which sort yours is? Ring 0800 689 0668 before reaching for a screwdriver.
An impact that leaves the case unmarked can still kill the heads inside a spinning drive — clicking or hanging at boot after a fall means power off, now, and no second tries. Spills are a corrosion countdown, and the folk remedies all lose: rice absorbs nothing useful, radiators bake the damage in, and 'just checking if it starts' is how half the write-offs happen. Move fast getting the drive out — or the machine to somebody who can — and the odds stay firmly with you; in our experience the drive outlives whatever it was that killed the computer.
Any storage format of the last two decades might be inside a laptop, so every door here stays open:
Logged at arrival, grounded handling throughout, and a full image taken before recovery proper starts. No exceptions for anyone's deadline.
NVMe and SATA M.2, mSATA, 2230 and 2242 stubs, Apple blades, even elderly IDE — native connections for whatever the machine carried.
Firmware-level access for laptop drives identical to anything on the main benches. Small patients get the full consultant treatment.
Dropped-machine head swaps happen under the filtered hood with donors drawn from matched stock.
Spill casualties get corrosion treatment and an ultrasonic clean until boards and connectors read dependably again.
Imaging is enforced read-only from the first connection. Nothing here can write to a customer drive.
Fleet ThinkPads from the business parks, gaming MSIs, the family Pavilion soldiering on — inside them all sit the MQ04ABF100-class drives and SN770-class modules covered on the dedicated pages, and the bare unit is what should reach us. The boundaries, stated once and kindly: nothing soldered to a board, and never a phone or tablet.
Office-fleet Lifebooks and box-room Amilos keep turning up across North Yorkshire long after Fujitsu bowed out of consumer laptops, usually carrying ten years of documents copied nowhere else. Their 2.5-inch drives age to a timetable — firmware hangs, weary heads, sector damage arriving in clusters — and once unscrewed and posted, the work is standard mechanical recovery: delicate regions imaged last, donors used only where heads have truly died. The Lifebook itself can stay on its shelf.
Modern VivoBooks and ZenBooks exit without a sound: M.2 failure, 'no boot device', and every file waiting patiently in NAND for a service-mode session or chip-level read. Toshiba's Satellite era leaves audibly instead — MQ-generation drives wearing their heads down, slowing to a shuffle, ticking under pressure. Both roads finish at the same rigs: drive or module out, image taken, data home. Only the thinnest soldered-storage machines get turned away, because promises there would be dishonest.
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.
Free the drive or M.2 module before it travels — no machine stripping happens at this end. Most laptops give it up after one base panel and a few screws; wrap the bare unit in an anti-static bag or foil and post only that. The exception we cannot take is storage soldered to the board, since removable media marks the working boundary here.
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.