Free 48-hour diagnosis, we will agree a fixed price prior to commencing any work and you do not have to pay for anything on most jobs if they are unsuccessful. We serve Macclesfield and the nearby Cheshire area.
Approximately 40 minutes and 18 miles separate Macclesfield from our workshop – either bring it down yourself or post it.
Wilmslow, Poynton and Bollington plus the greater Cheshire region.
We are 40 minutes away via the A523, which equates to approximately 18 miles from Macclesfield. Far enough for some customers to send their device via insured post, but close enough for others to drop it in the same day.
We have found that Macclesfield has an economic base based heavily in both pharmaceutical research & manufacturing and silk trade heritage & professional employment. This creates a unique combination of work; laboratory and research data, validated instrument drives, quality & regulatory records & consultancy machines. As such, laboratory and pharmaceutical work is subject to regulation that many other sectors do not have to follow and often instrument drives are old enough to be older than the regulations governing their use.
These are drawn from the jobs that are sent to us, as opposed to being selected out of a capability list.
Given the above description of Macclesfield's economic base we receive similar types of jobs/requests for recovery assistance in relation to laboratory and research data, validated instrument drives, quality and regulatory records, consultancy machines etc. A different combination from what might be received from other areas, and one that will influence our pricing and speed of response.
Work in laboratories and in pharmaceuticals has a regulatory element for the most part absent in other sectors; similarly many instrument drives have been around since long before the regulation governing those drives.
That said, there is also just the usual amount of household work which is found in every area, namely: laptops will no longer start, external hard drives with family photo collections on them or a memory card for your camera which was inadvertently formatted. These are £250-£300 + VAT and are typically the quickest type of job we complete. Business and array work sent from Macclesfield and throughout Cheshire are £500+ VAT.
There's no cost, there's no delay, and they decide more than most of what happens at the bench.
The clicking and grinding of a hard disk gets worse the longer it runs. The amount of time since the first noise has been made by the hard disk is the number one determining factor for how well it can be recovered.
Even though a hard disk may be reading very slowly and generating errors, it is still readable, and that window can close without warning. Copy the most valuable files first, to somewhere else.
Windows, macOS and cameras all offer to repair, initialise or format. All will overwrite the data structures a recovery can use.
When installing the program for recovery, it will write in the area where your deleted files exist. If you try software, install it and recover to different hard drives.
Often one phone call determines if an item needs to be shipped at all; sometimes even more simply it can be determined that you can fix the problem yourself from Macclesfield.
This costs us the job, but it's the right answer.
The drive still mounts and reads. Just copy your files off yourself — most important items first — then stop using it. Nothing a lab does to a readable drive you already own can add anything useful.
The files are in a backup you forgot about. Check the version history in the cloud. Or Time Machine. Or Previous Versions. Or a copy someone emailed. Many enquiries are resolved in just five minutes, at no cost.
A recent deletion from a healthy drive. Reputable read-only software, installed on a separate drive, will often do it for just a fraction of what we charge.
Your BitLocker key exists after all. It's almost always held by IT in Azure AD or Intune if it's on a company workstation. That one question has resolved more of these issues than anything else we have done technically.
Send the device in with an initial report of what has occurred to it. The diagnosis is at no charge and commits you to nothing, and the subsequent fee is written as a firm price prior to opening anything.
This is the only step that requires input from you and nothing else can happen until the device is on our bench. Package your item properly and include all the information we require about you and your item(s), then ship them to us. Then comes a no-cost diagnostic, followed by a written quote.
Posting it? Use a tracked and insured service. The value of what is on the drive far exceeds the cost of postage. Bringing it in? Weekdays from 9am to 5:30pm, and it still needs packing as described above for the journey.
Tell us about the item in question, tell us how it has been behaving lately, and let us know if there is anything you have done as far as troubleshooting goes so that our engineers may provide a realistic estimate of success and a probable cost range prior to sending your items off.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 0161 871 0788.
The address of Peter House where you drop off items from Macclesfield is Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN. We are open Monday to Friday from 9 am – 5:30 pm. It is approximately 18 miles away via the A523 and takes roughly 40 minutes. Or send it to us insured — we pay for return shipping as well.
We can offer you the "band" that applies to you right now — our published prices begin at £250 + VAT for cards, and £300 + VAT for a single drive. Once we have finished the initial 48-hour no-charge diagnostic work, we will write to you with an accurate price quote which will not change thereafter.
Turn it off now and leave it off. Clicking means a head is unable to locate its servo data, and every subsequent power-up may potentially damage the platter surface. As such, how long it runs after the first noise is far more important to the result than anything we might do.
On a regular basis. For example, NDAs are always signed; you get one named contact from the beginning of each diagnostic project through to completion; invoices are sent instead of processing credit/debit card payments for established firms; and, as required by your insurance company or auditor, we document in writing exactly what happened when something went wrong.
From £250 + VAT for cards and USB media; from £300 + VAT for a single drive, laptop or Mac with removable storage; £550 + VAT flat rate for a Fusion Drive; and from £500 + VAT for RAID, NAS & servers — each quoted in writing after a complimentary 48-hour diagnostic.
Occasionally, when it's a logical fault on healthy hardware dropped in early; physical recovery cannot be compressed that far — handling priority will move you to the head of the queue, however you still cannot make a failing hard disk read at a faster speed.
There is no cost involved with the diagnosis; most jobs will have no charge unless your data is recovered, and we have an office in Manchester which is about eighteen miles away as opposed to being at the end of a delivery chain. Send it via courier and insure it – or walk it in – both start the same way.