When a screen, motherboard, power circuit, or Windows installation fails, it doesn't touch the information stored on your hard drive. So when you pull the drive out of a laptop that won't turn on, the failure of that device no longer matters — which is why we typically consider a laptop that will not turn on to be inexpensive data recovery versus catastrophic loss. If you're looking to recover pictures, we recommend starting with how deleted photos are recovered, as the location of the images greatly impacts our ability to recover them.
A screen, motherboard, power circuit, or failed Windows installation does not impact anything on your disk. When the drive can be removed, we will access it separately using other specialised equipment. Therefore, a computer that will not boot is often just inconvenient versus lost.
There are two very similar scenarios based upon how they appear externally but vastly different in cost.
Thirty seconds of watching what happens when you attempt to boot up your computer can tell you whether you have a dead computer or a dead drive.
No display at all, and no beeps. When your machine does not reach POST, that means the machine has not yet looked at the hard drive. Therefore, if your machine will not post, there is a good chance it is a failure of the motherboard, power supply or memory. That is also why the drive is very likely untouched. Solid amber or orange power lights on Dell machines are examples of board faults, not storage faults.
A BIOS screen, then “no bootable device”. In this case, the drive is now in play. The machine got far enough to look for a drive and found nothing usable, so it could either be that the drive is bad, a partition has been lost, or the boot order has simply been changed.
Windows starts loading, then fails. This tells us that the drive is operational. Usually when you see this it is due to an OS corruption/file system issue and not due to a hardware problem.
The commercial difference is key here. If the mother board is bad but the drive is good, that is a copy job and therefore priced as such, which frequently ends up being cheaper than any other service we provide. People assume they have lost all their information when they throw away a computer. They usually haven't.
The first thing to establish – because it determines what is possible before a fault has been diagnosed.
Most desktops and laptops still use storage that comes out — a 2.5-inch SATA drive, or an M.2 SSD held by one screw. These are always imaged on separate hardware regardless of what the machine is doing. This is why most dead laptops are easy jobs.
An increasing number of thin laptops solder their storage directly to the mainboard. In cases where the board still works data can often be extracted through it. When the board fails there may not be any route at all and if encryption was tied to the failed board there will be no route at all. Let us know your laptop's make and model so we can determine which type you have before sending anything.
Checking both is free and both change the job.
BitLocker. Many modern consumer laptops and business laptops have encryption enabled. That is true whether or not anyone chose it. Your IT department should be able to obtain the recovery key from either a Microsoft account on an employee's home computer or an Azure AD, Intune or Active Directory account on an office computer within minutes. If they cannot get the recovery key, no one will open the volume. This check has no cost and sometimes saves all of the work.
The other drive. It is quite common in this area for computers to be purchased with a small solid-state drive (SSD) to run Windows, while having a larger hard drive for data storage. Many employees will submit only the boot drive to be recovered when their data is located on the hard drive. If your computer has both an SSD and a hard disk, please inform us — we may be able to make recovering your information as simple as making a copy of the hard drive, which would take approximately five minutes.
This price covers the drive. The amount of time and/or money involved in doing the actual work will vary depending upon what is wrong with the drive.
You can expect to pay from £300 +VAT for each single laptop/desktop hard drive, fixed in writing after the free diagnostic. This cost is what you would get regardless of whether your diagnosis is a broken head-stack or a bad partition table. We don't charge by how badly it seems during the diagnostic process.
If it can be less: if our diagnostic shows a good hard disk but a bad laptop, then that is a copy and not a recovery — so we charge according to that. If our diagnostic shows a job you could do yourself using read-only software on a hard disk that is physically good then we will let you know.
When the deposit applies: when you open a drive or fit donor parts, there are real costs from the time the work starts, so these types of jobs require 50% payment when the job commences with the remainder paid upon successful completion. All other items have no cost if they fail. Before proceeding, you will know which type of item it was.
Send your hard drive to us; provide a short description of your computer/laptop and what the problem is. Our diagnostic has no cost associated with it. A single figure is given in writing prior to starting any work.
Nothing starts until the drive is on our bench. Please just send us the hard drive or SSD; we cannot receive full laptops/desktops. Ensure you have wrapped it properly so as to protect during shipping. Include your name/phone number/e-mail address etc. so we can get in touch with you. There will be no charge for diagnostics, but prior to doing any work, we will provide you with one figure in writing.
Posting it? Use a tracked and insured service. The value of what is on the drive far exceeds the cost of postage. Bringing it in? Weekdays from 9am to 5:30pm, and it still needs packing as described above for the journey.
You're not certain if shipping it is worthwhile? Write to us regarding the machine and problem (and/or what has been done thus far), and an engineer will read each one of them and come up with a truthful assessment of how much chance there is of success, and a price range, before you ship anything to us.
We’ll be in touch shortly. If it’s urgent, call 0161 871 0788.
We answer some of the most common technical questions regarding laptop and PC recovery.
Almost never. When a laptop will not turn on, it usually has nothing to do with the hard drive. A failed screen, power circuit or mother board leaves the hard disk alone. Where the drive can be pulled out of the case, even if the machine doesn’t work at all, it can be read using separate equipment. At that point, the condition of the computer no longer matters.
Yes. Please remove the hard disk/SSD from the laptops/desktops and ship just the drive. Unfortunately, we cannot accept full computers. Most computer shops will remove it within minutes of asking them to.
Only if the recovery key is really lost — which isn’t as common as most people think. Keys for BitLocker are generally stored by way of either an escrowed service like Azure AD, Intune or Active Directory, and your IT team could likely get yours back in minutes. Ask before you assume the worst.
That makes a big difference, and it's something to mention. The small-SSD-and-large-disk combination is very common; people frequently ship the boot drive when their files are actually located on the other drive. Knowing what we're looking for can make recovering your files nothing more than copying them.
It ultimately comes down to whether the motherboard still functions. For example, while the motherboard still operates, data should often be able to be retrieved through it. If however, the motherboard fails — particularly where the encryption is dependent upon it — then there could potentially be no path forward at all. We’ll let you know prior to posting how likely that would be based on the model number you provide.
Typically our free diagnostics will be completed within 48 hours. On average, a standard single drive recovery takes approximately 3–4 working days to complete once approved. However, donor components or extensive imaging will both increase those timelines; you will receive the estimated timeline along with your quote rather than after the fact.
Laptops don't really matter — the hard drive inside them does as well as if encryption has been turned on to protect your data or even if you can remove your storage media from the unit. More budget laptops are now having their hard drives soldered into place; while more ultrabooks will have non-removable SSDs.
Names with an arrow have their own guides, i.e., brand-specific failures and what those will mean for the recovery.
£300 +VAT each. When a laptop fails to load there's likely to be nothing wrong with its disk — it’s the motherboard that has gone. Check if the user had enabled device encryption prior to taking the thing apart as the key will reside on the board that has stopped working.