A free 48hr diagnostic. A fixed price agreed before any work is carried out. Nothing to pay for most jobs that fail. Serves Ashton-under-Lyne and the Greater Manchester area.
Approximately 15 mins & 6 miles away from Ashton-under-Lyne to our workbench – either deliver it yourself or send by post.
Covering areas such as Denton, Hyde and Stalybridge and other parts of the Greater Manchester area.
Ashton-under-Lyne is approximately 6 miles east of us along the A635 & M60, i.e. approximately 15 minutes outside rush hours. Many people will often take their device with them when they pass by rather than sending it through the postal service.
Retail, distribution and light manufacturing are all main drivers for Ashton-under-Lyne's economy. The surrounding Tameside area has many small-scale engineering operations as well. For us this will be a unique mix of work: retail and hospitality till systems, small workshop machines and family computers. With six miles and a straight run down the M60 motorway, Ashton-under-Lyne is also one of the fastest drop-off locations in Greater Manchester.
These are drawn from the jobs that are sent to us, as opposed to being selected out of a capability list.
The retail, distribution and light manufacturing sectors operating in and around Ashton-under-Lyne drive the majority of our recovery work from the area. As such the specific types of equipment/computers we receive from this location are primarily retail and hospitality till systems, small workshop type machines and family computers. This creates a number of differences in comparison to other towns/cities we recover equipment from. These differences influence both the quotes we produce and how quickly we can react to an enquiry/recovery request.
With six miles and a direct route along the M60 motorway, Ashton-under-Lyne is also one of the quickest drop-off locations within Greater Manchester.
In addition to this there are also all those standard jobs that households in each district produce; for example, failed-to-start laptops, camera cards that were accidentally formatted and external drives loaded up with photos. These jobs cost between £250 and £300 + VAT and are often the quickest we handle. Business/array work from Ashton-under-Lyne and throughout Greater Manchester starts from £500 + VAT.
Regardless of whether the job is walked in or sent via a courier service, the steps are the same.
Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, Monday to Friday 9am to 5:30pm — or insured post from Ashton-under-Lyne. Please send the bare hard drive or SSD i.e. without a laptop or desktop system.
The fault type will be identified — mechanical, electronic, firmware or logical — so the route, pricing and probability of recovery can be determined.
There is one price quoted prior to the job being worked on, which doesn’t change once accepted. If software would do the job, or no recovery is possible, then that will be communicated to you instead.
We will image your drive read-only and rebuild the original data using our copy. In addition to rebuilding the files we will verify they can be opened. Finally, we will send your recovered data back to you on new media and at no additional charge for postage back to Ashton-under-Lyne.
Everyone loses when you waste time going to see an expert unnecessarily.
Phones and tablets. This is not something we take on; modern mobile devices have such sophisticated encryption schemes to protect your data that attempting to recover information via third parties is extremely difficult, so if images are what matter to you, realistically using iCloud, Google Photos or a backup is the most likely solution, as opposed to a lab.
Soldered Mac storage on a dead board. The flash is soldered onto T2 and Apple Silicon systems along with being encrypted by the security chip. Therefore, once that main board dies, there will be absolutely no one able to recover anything off that board – none of us, nor Apple, nor those who quote four figures for extracting at the board level.
Encryption without the key. BitLocker, FileVault and hardware encrypted drives are opened only through providing credentials. Before calling us check with your IT team; they may hold the escrowed keys — more often than you'd think.
Send the device in with an initial report of what has occurred to it. The diagnosis is at no charge and commits you to nothing, and the subsequent fee is written as a firm price prior to opening anything.
This is the only step that requires input from you and nothing else can happen until the device is on our bench. Package your item properly and include all the information we require about you and your item(s), then ship them to us. Then comes a no-cost diagnostic, followed by a written quote.
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.
Tell us about the item in question, tell us how it has been behaving lately, and let us know if there is anything you have done as far as troubleshooting goes so that our engineers may provide a realistic estimate of success and a probable cost range prior to sending your items off.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 0161 871 0788.
Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, Monday to Friday 9am to 5:30pm. We’re about six miles away via the A635 and M60. This would normally take around fifteen minutes to travel. Alternatively, please insure the item being sent and we will cover the return postage whether you decide to use postal services or drop it into the office yourself.
We can offer you the "band" that applies to you right now — our published prices begin at £250 + VAT for cards, and £300 + VAT for a single drive. Once we have finished the initial 48-hour no-charge diagnostic work, we will write to you with an accurate price quote which will not change thereafter.
Turn it off now and leave it off. Clicking means a head is unable to locate its servo data, and every subsequent power-up may potentially damage the platter surface. As such, how long it runs after the first noise is far more important to the result than anything we might do.
On a regular basis. For example, NDAs are always signed; you get one named contact from the beginning of each diagnostic project through to completion; invoices are sent instead of processing credit/debit card payments for established firms; and, as required by your insurance company or auditor, we document in writing exactly what happened when something went wrong.
From £250 + VAT for cards and USB media; from £300 + VAT for a single drive, laptop or Mac with removable storage; £550 + VAT flat rate for a Fusion Drive; and from £500 + VAT for RAID, NAS & servers — each quoted in writing after a complimentary 48-hour diagnostic.
Occasionally, when it's a logical fault on healthy hardware dropped in early; physical recovery cannot be compressed that far — handling priority will move you to the head of the queue, however you still cannot make a failing hard disk read at a faster speed.
We do a free diagnostic. Most of our jobs are charged no fee unless the data is recovered. Our offices are located in Manchester which is 6 miles from Ashton-under-Lyne. Therefore you can walk in with your media or have it sent to us via an insured postal service. Both start the same way.