Free 48-hour diagnostic, a fixed price agreed before any work, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Serving Salford and the surrounding Greater Manchester area.
Roughly 15 minutes and 2 miles separate Salford from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Eccles, Swinton and Worsley and the wider Greater Manchester area.
Salford is about two miles west of us via the A6 and M602 — roughly 15 minutes outside rush hour. Most people drop devices in on the way past rather than posting them.
Salford runs on MediaCityUK and the broadcast and production companies clustered around it, alongside the university and a substantial logistics presence. What that means for us is a particular mix of work: camera cards and shuttle drives off shoots, edit-suite RAID arrays, and student work from the university. Media production is unusually well represented here, and it brings its own pattern: footage lost between shoot and edit, on cards and portable SSDs that have been in and out of readers all week.
Covering Eccles, Swinton and Worsley and the surrounding area.
Every town sends us a slightly different set of problems, because the economy decides what people are storing and on what. Salford is built on MediaCityUK and the broadcast and production companies clustered around it, alongside the university and a substantial logistics presence — so the devices that arrive here are camera cards and shuttle drives off shoots, edit-suite RAID arrays, and student work from the university.
Media production is unusually well represented here, and it brings its own pattern: footage lost between shoot and edit, on cards and portable SSDs that have been in and out of readers all week.
That matters for two practical reasons. It tells us what to expect before a device arrives, which shortens the diagnostic. And it means the questions we ask on the phone are the ones relevant to your situation rather than a script — a production line PC and a family laptop are not the same conversation, even when the drive inside them is identical.
The same whether you walk it in or send it by courier.
Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, Monday to Friday 9am to 5:30pm — or insured post from Salford. Send the bare drive rather than the whole machine where you can.
The fault is classified — mechanical, electronic, firmware or logical — because that decides the route, the price and the realistic odds.
One figure, agreed before anything is touched, and it does not move afterwards. If software would do it, or nothing can be recovered, you hear that instead.
Imaged read-only, rebuilt from the copy, verified by opening files rather than counting them, and returned on fresh media with free shipping back to Salford.
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.
Yes — Salford and the surrounding area including Eccles, Swinton and Worsley. We’re about two miles away via the A6 and M602, roughly 15 minutes. Drop-off or insured post both start the same free 48-hour diagnostic.
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.
The diagnostic is normally back inside 48 hours. From approval a single drive usually completes in three to four working days; array and donor-part work takes longer and you get the timescale with the quote.
The drive alone where you can — cheaper to post, quicker to start, and any computer shop in Salford will remove it in minutes. External units are the exception and should come complete with their enclosure.
You pay nothing on most jobs. The diagnostic is free and the majority of our work is no fix, no fee — forensic examination, CCTV and data destruction are the exceptions, and we say so before you commit.
Yes. Data stays in the UK, work is carried out in-house rather than subcontracted, NDAs are signed as standard for business work, and working copies are destroyed after a retention period you set.
The diagnostic costs nothing, most jobs carry no fee unless the data comes back, and the bench is 2 miles away rather than at the end of a courier chain. Walk it in, or send it insured — both start the same way.