Laptops choose their moments: dead first thing on the morning of the deadline, endlessly looping on the logo the night the photos were finally getting backed up, wearing a coffee at nine o'clock on a Monday. The machine is often finished, but 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 we send your files back.
We diagnose all laptop jobs for free. We give you a fixed quote, in writing, before the first screw is lifted.
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 task on any laptop repair is to compare your symptoms with what could be causing the problem. After twenty-odd years of doing this, these twenty-five are responsible for virtually all of what comes through our doors.
The board or charging circuit has failed, but the drive inside is untouched. Bad news for the laptop; good news for your data.
Corrosion operates in terms of days. In most cases when the storage is pulled promptly, it escapes. When it's left for two weeks, it is fighting chemistry, and in general, chemistry tends to win.
The spinning drive took the landing on its heads. Donor work on the head-swap bench comes next, so please don't keep re-testing it at home.
Failing disk or broken Windows, the exit is identical: files exit by way of the drive on our rigs, never through the operating system.
Broken system but good documents. This is one of the milder jobs on this page, as long as the disk underneath is healthy.
One boot error, no click, no drama: the modern failure. The M.2 module comes out and gets crossed over to the flash side.
The dusty fan slowly overheats the drive bay, one film night at a time. We save the data before the heat finishes the job.
All systems are working except the screen. The drive is removed at your end and imaged at ours with no problems.
All user accounts were wiped by the rescue attempt. We search the areas of the drive the installer never reached, which is usually most of the disk.
Recovery goes normally as long as the key or password comes too. Bring it up in the first phone call and you won't have to worry about any delays.
A stiff hinge works away at the corner for months until the board gives way. The storage sits elsewhere and never feels a thing.
That boot screen is your drive reading its own obituary. Switch it off and get a quote first, on 0800 689 0668 or with the free online diagnostic, before you send in your drive. Then post us the drive and keep the laptop.
Free-fall sensors park the heads when they win. Mid-write, they sometimes lose, and then donor heads finish the business.
The Toshiba "everywhere" drive fades into slow reads and soft ticking. Our rigs image the weakest head last. That is the whole purpose of imaging on rigs.
Unbranded USB-C chargers will spike your board and on occasion the drive electronics behind it. Both of these failures have well-worn paths to recovery here.
The expanding battery cell presses up into whatever is above it, often the storage. Stop charging it today. Get the drive out this week.
Screen-first crush injuries rarely touch the storage. When we lift the drive from the wreck, it images as if nothing happened, because to the drive nothing did.
SN770-class modules may be present at shutdown but missing at the next boot. Out of the machine and into service mode it goes.
When a device undergoes heat soak through the glass, this causes the storage to age silently over time. These read errors typically manifest themselves many weeks after the weather has changed.
Random or intermittent power losses slowly corrupt the file table. The damaged volume is rebuilt from a complete image.
The sleep mode never actually slept, and the insulation did its job all too well. The storage aged a year in a single afternoon, and the drive was imaged before there was a second afternoon.
A newly bought SSD was partially populated, and the older drive was wiped for resale. Panic complete; we work beneath the wipe on the original drive, and the sooner it stops being used, the more recovery is possible.
Ultrabook lids pass all the pressure applied to them through to the board, and the module's solder keeps count. Modules are reflowed and then run through our flash imaging rigs.
Windows lost the account and offered an empty shell instead. The real folders remain intact on the disk; we pull these out directly, since arguing with Windows would be pointless.
Small soldered chips wear down and fail just like other types of flash. Said clearly, as usual: soldered storage goes beyond what we take on.
Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer, Asus, MSI, Surface: the badge on the lid changes nothing, because what matters is the 2.5-inch drive or M.2 module sitting behind the base panel. You take that panel off at your end, as we don't do the removal ourselves, and any York repair shop will free the drive for the price of a coffee if screwdrivers aren't your thing. Once you have your quote, post the bare drive on its own. One word of warning from long experience: some slim ultrabooks solder the storage to the motherboard, and soldered chips are outside what we recover. Not sure which sort you have? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you reach for a screwdriver.
A drop that doesn't leave marks on the outside of a casing can still kill the heads inside a spinning hard drive. When the drive begins to click or hang at boot-up after a drop, turn off the power immediately and do not try again. Spills start a countdown to corrosion, and the common "remedies" won't work: rice absorbs nothing useful from inside a spill-damaged device, radiators simply bake the damage in place, and trying to start the device up (just to see if it works) is how a large number of write-offs happen. The sooner you remove the drive from the system (or get the machine to someone who can), the better your chances of getting the data back, because in our experience, a drive usually outlasts whatever killed its host computer.
We keep every option open, since almost any storage format produced over the last twenty years may be inside a laptop.
Every job is logged on arrival, handled with grounding from start to finish, and fully imaged before the recovery proper begins. No exceptions, whatever the deadline.
NVMe and SATA M.2, mSATA, 2230 and 2242 stubs, Apple blades, even the older IDE: whatever that particular machine carried gets a native connection.
Laptop drives get the same firmware-level access as anything on the main rigs. All small patients receive the same consultant treatment as large ones.
Head swaps on dropped machines are done at the head-swap bench, using donors drawn from our matched stock.
All spill casualties receive corrosion treatment and then ultrasonic cleaning until their boards and connectors read reliably again.
Imaging is read-only from the moment of first connection; nothing in this process can write to any customer's hard drive.
The fleet ThinkPads from the business parks, gaming MSIs and the family Pavilion still going strong: inside each of these sit the same MQ04ABF100-class drives and SN770-class modules we cover on their own pages, and it's just the bare unit that should be sent to us. The boundaries, stated once and kindly: nothing soldered to a board, and no phones or tablets.
Office-fleet Lifebooks and box-room Amilos continue to surface throughout North Yorkshire many years after Fujitsu exited the consumer laptop market. These machines often carry ten years' worth of documents which exist nowhere else. Their 2.5-inch drives age in a predictable pattern: firmware gets stuck, tired heads start failing, and sector damage appears in clusters. Once you have your quote and the drive is unscrewed and posted to us, the work is standard mechanical recovery: the most fragile areas are imaged last, and donors are only used when the heads have completely failed. The Lifebook itself can stay on your shelf.
The modern VivoBook and ZenBook both shut down quietly: no sound as the M.2 fails, "no boot device", and all your files sitting patiently in NAND for a service-mode session or chip-level read. Toshiba's Satellite era, however, does make some noise, with MQ-generation drives wearing their heads down, slowing to a shuffle and ticking under pressure. Either way, we end up at the same rigs: drive or module out, image taken, data home. Only the thinnest soldered-storage machines are turned away, because promises there would be dishonest.
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.
Before posting, free your drive or M.2 module, as 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, once you have your quote, post only that. We cannot accept any storage soldered directly to the board, as removable media marks the working boundary here. If you're not sure which kind of storage you have, please call us first (0800 689 0668).
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.