Free 48-hour diagnostic, a fixed price agreed before any work, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Serving Blackburn and the surrounding Lancashire area.
Roughly 45 minutes and 24 miles separate Blackburn from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Darwen, Accrington and Great Harwood and the wider Lancashire area.
Blackburn is twenty-four miles from us on the M65, about 38 minutes. Close enough for same-day drop-off, far enough that plenty of customers send devices by insured post instead.
Blackburn runs on manufacturing that survived the textile decline, food production, engineering and a significant public sector presence. What that means for us is a particular mix of work: production and quality-control machines, accounts servers from family firms, and CCTV from industrial premises. Manufacturing brings a particular problem: control software licensed to specific hardware, on drives older than anyone still working there.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Blackburn runs on manufacturing that survived the textile decline, food production, engineering and a significant public sector presence, and the recovery work follows directly from that. In practice what reaches the bench from here is production and quality-control machines, accounts servers from family firms, and CCTV from industrial premises — a different mix from, say, a market town or a university city, and one that shapes how we quote and how quickly we move.
Manufacturing brings a particular problem: control software licensed to specific hardware, on drives older than anyone still working there.
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 Blackburn and across Lancashire 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 Blackburn. 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 Blackburn.
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.
For larger jobs and business clients, yes — ring and we will arrange it. Otherwise rsquo;re about twenty-four miles away via the m65, roughly 38 minutes. Insured post works equally well and return shipping is included.
Yes, and there is no obligation attached. You get a written answer on what failed, what is realistically recoverable and one fixed price. If the answer is that nothing can be done, or that software would manage it, you hear that instead of an invoice.
Hard drives, SSDs and NVMe, external drives, USB sticks and memory cards, Macs with removable storage, RAID arrays, NAS units, servers and virtual machines. We don’t recover phones or tablets.
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.
It comes back on fresh media and our working copies are securely destroyed after a retention period you choose. Nothing is kept beyond that, and data never leaves the UK.
Almost never. A failed screen, board or power circuit has nothing to do with the drive, and where the drive lifts out it is read on separate equipment. A dead laptop is usually an inconvenience rather than a loss.
The diagnostic costs nothing, most jobs carry no fee unless the data comes back, and the bench is 24 miles away rather than at the end of a courier chain. Walk it in, or send it insured — both start the same way.