Free 48-hour diagnostic, a fixed price agreed before any work, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Serving Manchester and the surrounding Greater Manchester area.
Peter House, central Manchester — open weekdays for drop-ins, with insured post whenever it suits.
Covering Salford, Stockport and Trafford and the wider Greater Manchester area.
We are in 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.
Manchester runs on a city centre economy built on professional services, media, universities and a large and growing technology sector. What that means for us is a particular mix of work: agency and studio machines, chambers and practice servers, university research drives, and the NAS boxes small firms in the Northern Quarter run everything from. We are on Oxford Street, a few minutes from Oxford Road station and walkable from Piccadilly, so most city-centre drop-offs take about the length of a coffee break.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Manchester runs on a city centre economy built on professional services, media, universities and a large and growing technology sector, and the recovery work follows directly from that. In practice what reaches the bench from here is agency and studio machines, chambers and practice servers, university research drives, and the NAS boxes small firms in the Northern Quarter run everything from — a different mix from, say, a market town or a university city, and one that shapes how we quote and how quickly we move.
We are on Oxford Street, a few minutes from Oxford Road station and walkable from Piccadilly, so most city-centre drop-offs take about the length of a coffee break.
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 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 Manchester 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.
For larger jobs and business clients, yes — ring and we will arrange it. Otherwise rsquo;re in manchester itself, on oxford street. 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.
Diagnosis in writing at no charge, no fee on most jobs unless we succeed, and two decades spent recovering the irreplaceable from the middle of town. Drop it at Peter House, or post it over.