Free 48-hour diagnostic, a fixed price agreed before any work, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Serving Greater Manchester and the surrounding Greater Manchester area.
Wherever in Greater Manchester you are, the bench sits central — we’re in the city centre, on Oxford Street. Post it over, or bring it in yourself.
Covering Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan and the wider Greater Manchester area.
We are in Greater Manchester — 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.
Greater Manchester runs on ten boroughs with genuinely different economies — professional services and media in the centre and Salford, engineering across the north, distribution along the M62 and M6, and a large university and healthcare sector throughout. What that means for us is a particular mix of work: everything from a single family laptop to multi-shelf arrays out of corporate data rooms. The M60 means nowhere in Greater Manchester is much more than forty minutes from us, and most of the county drops devices in rather than posting them.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Greater Manchester runs on ten boroughs with genuinely different economies — professional services and media in the centre and Salford, engineering across the north, distribution along the M62 and M6, and a large university and healthcare sector throughout, and the recovery work follows directly from that. In practice what reaches the bench from here is everything from a single family laptop to multi-shelf arrays out of corporate data rooms — a different mix from, say, a market town or a university city, and one that shapes how we quote and how quickly we move.
The M60 means nowhere in Greater Manchester is much more than forty minutes from us, and most of the county drops devices in rather than posting them.
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 Greater Manchester and across Greater Manchester starts from £500 +VAT.
Free, quick, and they decide more than most of what happens on the bench.
Clicking and grinding get measurably worse with runtime. How long a drive ran after the first noise is the single biggest factor in the result.
A slow drive throwing errors is still a drive you can read, and that window closes without warning. Most valuable files first, to somewhere else.
Windows, macOS and cameras all offer to format, initialise or repair. Each writes over the structures a recovery would use.
The installer writes into the space holding your deleted files. If you try software, install and recover to different drives.
A short conversation frequently establishes whether the device should travel at all — and occasionally that you can fix it yourself from Greater Manchester without us.
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 Greater Manchester 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 from the middle of the county. Call into Manchester, or send it in fully insured.
Our unit is at Oxford Street, M1 5AN — central to the county, a few minutes from Oxford Road station and walkable from Piccadilly. Drop your device in, or send it by tracked post; the diagnostic is free either way.