Free 48-hour diagnostic, a fixed price agreed before any work, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Serving Macclesfield and the surrounding Cheshire area.
Roughly 55 minutes and 18 miles separate Macclesfield from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Wilmslow, Poynton and Bollington and the wider Cheshire area.
Macclesfield is eighteen miles from us on the A523, about 28 minutes. Close enough for same-day drop-off, far enough that plenty of customers send devices by insured post instead.
Macclesfield runs on pharmaceutical research and manufacturing on a significant scale, alongside silk-trade heritage and a prosperous professional population. What that means for us is a particular mix of work: research and laboratory data, validated instrument drives, quality and regulatory records, and consultancy machines. Laboratory and pharmaceutical work is regulated to a degree most sectors are not, and instrument drives are frequently older than the regulations covering them.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Macclesfield runs on pharmaceutical research and manufacturing on a significant scale, alongside silk-trade heritage and a prosperous professional population, and the recovery work follows directly from that. In practice what reaches the bench from here is research and laboratory data, validated instrument drives, quality and regulatory records, and consultancy machines — a different mix from, say, a market town or a university city, and one that shapes how we quote and how quickly we move.
Laboratory and pharmaceutical work is regulated to a degree most sectors are not, and instrument drives are frequently older than the regulations covering 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 Macclesfield and across Cheshire 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 Macclesfield without us.
It costs us the job and it is the right answer.
The drive still mounts and reads. Copy your files off yourself, most important first, then stop using it. There is nothing a laboratory adds to a drive you can still read.
The files are in a backup you forgot about. Cloud version history, Time Machine, Previous Versions, a copy emailed to somebody. A meaningful share of enquiries end here, in five minutes, for nothing.
A recent deletion from a healthy drive. Reputable read-only software installed to a different drive will often do it for a fraction of our fee.
Your BitLocker key exists after all. On a work machine it is almost certainly held by IT in Azure AD or Intune. One question resolves more of these than any technical work we do.
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 eighteen miles away via the A523, roughly 28 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 18 miles away rather than at the end of a courier chain. Walk it in, or send it insured — both start the same way.