Free 48-hour diagnostic, a fixed price agreed before any work, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Serving Ashton-under-Lyne and the surrounding Greater Manchester area.
Roughly 12 minutes and 6 miles separate Ashton-under-Lyne from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Denton, Hyde and Stalybridge and the wider Greater Manchester area.
Ashton-under-Lyne is about six miles east of us via the A635 and M60 — roughly 15 minutes outside rush hour. Most people drop devices in on the way past rather than posting them.
Ashton-under-Lyne runs on retail, distribution and light manufacturing, with the wider Tameside area supporting a good deal of small-scale engineering. What that means for us is a particular mix of work: retail and hospitality till systems, small workshop machines, and family computers. Six miles and a straight run along the M60 makes Ashton one of the quicker drop-offs in Greater Manchester.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Ashton-under-Lyne runs on retail, distribution and light manufacturing, with the wider Tameside area supporting a good deal of small-scale engineering, and the recovery work follows directly from that. In practice what reaches the bench from here is retail and hospitality till systems, small workshop machines, and family computers — a different mix from, say, a market town or a university city, and one that shapes how we quote and how quickly we move.
Six miles and a straight run along the M60 makes Ashton one of the quicker drop-offs in Greater Manchester.
Alongside that there is the ordinary run of household work that every area produces: laptops that stopped starting, external drives full of photographs, camera cards formatted by mistake. Those are from £250 to £300 +VAT and are frequently the quickest jobs we handle. Business and array work from Ashton-under-Lyne and across Greater Manchester starts from £500 +VAT.
The same whether you walk it in or send it by courier.
Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, Monday to Friday 9am to 5:30pm — or insured post from Ashton-under-Lyne. Send the bare drive rather than the whole machine where you can.
The fault is classified — mechanical, electronic, firmware or logical — because that decides the route, the price and the realistic odds.
One figure, agreed before anything is touched, and it does not move afterwards. If software would do it, or nothing can be recovered, you hear that instead.
Imaged read-only, rebuilt from the copy, verified by opening files rather than counting them, and returned on fresh media with free shipping back to Ashton-under-Lyne.
Because a wasted trip helps nobody.
Phones and tablets. Not something we take on. Modern handsets are encrypted in a way that makes third-party recovery impractical, and if photographs are what matter the realistic route is iCloud, Google Photos or a backup rather than a laboratory.
Soldered Mac storage on a dead board. On T2 and Apple Silicon machines the flash is soldered and encrypted by the security chip. Once that board fails nobody recovers it — not us, not Apple, not anyone quoting four figures for board-level extraction.
Encryption without the key. BitLocker, FileVault and hardware-encrypted drives open with the credentials and by no other route. Worth checking with your IT department first — the key is escrowed far more often than people expect.
Send the device over with a short account of what happened to it. The diagnostic costs nothing and commits you to nothing, and the figure that follows is fixed in writing before anything is opened.
Nothing can begin until the device is on the bench, which makes this the only step that needs anything from you. Pack it properly, put your details in with it, and send it over. What follows is a free diagnostic and a written figure, in that order.
Posting it? Use something tracked and insured — whatever is on the drive is worth considerably more than the postage. Bringing it in? Weekdays, 9am to 5:30pm, and it still wants packing as above for the journey.
Tell us what the device is, what it is doing, and anything already tried — an engineer will come back with a realistic view of the odds and a price band, before you commit to posting anything.
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, roughly 15 minutes. Or post it insured — return shipping is free either way.
We can give you the band immediately — the published prices start at £250 plus VAT for cards and £300 for a single drive. The exact figure is fixed in writing after the free 48-hour diagnostic, and it does not move afterwards.
Switch it off and leave it off. Clicking means the heads cannot find their servo data, and every further power-on risks scoring the surface. How long it ran after the first noise affects the result more than anything we do.
Regularly. NDAs signed as standard, one named contact from diagnostic to delivery, invoicing rather than card payment for established firms, and a written account of what failed for insurers or auditors.
From £250 plus VAT for cards and USB media, from £300 plus VAT for a single drive, laptop or Mac with removable storage, £550 plus VAT flat for a Fusion Drive, and from £500 plus VAT for RAID, NAS and servers — each quoted in writing after a free 48-hour diagnostic.
Occasionally, on a logical fault with healthy hardware dropped in early. Physical recoveries cannot be compressed that far — priority handling moves you to the front of the queue but cannot make a failing drive read faster.
The diagnostic costs nothing, most jobs carry no fee unless the data comes back, and the bench is 6 miles away rather than at the end of a courier chain. Walk it in, or send it insured — both start the same way.