Free 48-hour diagnostic, a fixed price agreed before any work, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Serving Cheshire and the surrounding Cheshire area.
Most of north-east Cheshire lies only a few miles from the bench — we’re just across the Greater Manchester border, in Manchester. Post it over, or bring it in yourself.
Covering Chester, Crewe, Macclesfield, Warrington and Wilmslow and the wider Cheshire area.
We are in Cheshire — Peter House on Oxford Street, minutes from Oxford Road station and walkable from Piccadilly. Drop a device in between 9am and 5:30pm, Monday to Friday.
Cheshire runs on pharmaceutical research at Macclesfield, financial services at Chester, distribution and energy at Warrington, and railway and automotive engineering at Crewe. What that means for us is a particular mix of work: regulated laboratory data, financial services servers, enterprise virtual environments and engineering design files. Cheshire work skews toward the regulated end — pharmaceutical, financial and energy sector clients where documented handling and UK-only processing are requirements rather than preferences.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Cheshire runs on pharmaceutical research at Macclesfield, financial services at Chester, distribution and energy at Warrington, and railway and automotive engineering at Crewe, and the recovery work follows directly from that. In practice what reaches the bench from here is regulated laboratory data, financial services servers, enterprise virtual environments and engineering design files — a different mix from, say, a market town or a university city, and one that shapes how we quote and how quickly we move.
Cheshire work skews toward the regulated end — pharmaceutical, financial and energy sector clients where documented handling and UK-only processing are requirements rather than preferences.
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 Cheshire and across Cheshire starts from £500 +VAT.
Written out, because “send it in and we’ll be in touch” is not much of an answer.
Your device is booked in the day it arrives and you are told it landed. Where the symptoms suggest mechanical damage it is examined before being powered at all — family, firmware revision and head configuration identified first, because powering a damaged drive to see what happens is how recoverable data stops being recoverable.
Within about 48 hours you get a written answer to four questions: what failed, whether the platters or flash are damaged, what proportion is realistically recoverable, and one fixed price. Nothing is chargeable until you have agreed that figure, and it does not move afterwards.
From approval, the device is imaged read-only and every reconstruction attempt runs against that copy, so nothing we try can reduce what is recoverable. Files are opened in their applications rather than counted, anything unreadable is named, and the recovered data goes back to Cheshire on fresh media with return shipping included.
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 in Cheshire itself, on Oxford Street. 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.
A written diagnostic for nothing, no fee on most jobs unless we recover it, and two decades of doing this just over the county border. Call into Manchester, or send it in fully insured.
North-east Cheshire — Chorley, Wirral, Fleet and around — is served from our unit at Oxford Street, M1 5AN, a short run over the A331. Drop off or post it in; the diagnostic is free.