A plumber in Huyton had a Dell that would not switch on, and a tablet in the same drawer that would not either. He assumed the hard drive had gone and that the invoices and job records were gone with it. The tablet he was not bothered about. The Dell held eleven years of paperwork.
| Media | A Dell laptop that will not power on at all, assumed by the owner to be a drive failure, holding business records with no other copy. A tablet in the same enquiry with no data required. |
| What was reported | Dell laptop, will not switch on, owner suspected hard drive failure, invoices and job records needed from the drive, a separate tablet also dead with no data wanted from it. |
| Fault class | Not the drive. The laptop's own power circuitry had failed. The drive was healthy and read normally once it was out of the machine and on the bench. |
| On the bench | Drive removed by the owner and sent on its own, read behind a hardware write blocker on PC-3000 UDMA with health and firmware profiled, imaged on DeepSpar, filesystem parsed in R-Studio, records located, validated and written to fresh media. |
Will not switch on is a fault of the machine. Power circuitry, board, screen, charger, any of them will stop a laptop dead. None of them touches the disk. The drive has no idea the rest of the computer has failed and holds exactly what it held the last time the machine ran.
The drive gets read on its own, which is why the laptop never has to work again. Out of the chassis and onto the bench, it is just a drive. Whether the machine that housed it ever boots again is a repair question, and repair questions have no bearing on recovery.
Send the drive, not the laptop. Take the drive or SSD out and post that by itself. Internal drives are not removed from machines here, so a whole laptop arriving in a box is a job that cannot start. He unscrewed the caddy himself and sent the drive in an antistatic bag.
The tablet is a different answer, and it is no. Tablets and ultraslim machines almost always carry their storage as flash soldered directly to the logic board. Storage soldered to a logic board sits outside what this lab takes in, so there was nothing to quote. He did not need anything off it, but the answer would have been the same if he had.
The drive arrived on its own, as asked. It went behind a hardware write blocker onto PC-3000 UDMA where its health and firmware were profiled. It came ready without any argument and read cleanly across the surface, which settled the question of where the fault actually was.
It was imaged on DeepSpar, the filesystem parsed in R-Studio from the image, and the invoices, job records and photographs located. A sample from each year was opened and checked before the whole set was written to fresh media.
The drive was fine and always had been. Eleven years of paperwork came back and the Dell itself was left where it was, which is a repair question for somebody else.
One drive, £300 + VAT. Nothing needed opening and no board work was involved, so this ran on no fix, no fee terms. The tablet was declined at the enquiry stage because its storage is soldered to the board, and being told that on day one is more useful than being told it after postage.
Do not judge the drive by the machine. A laptop that will not power on has usually failed somewhere that has nothing to do with storage, and the drive inside is very often perfectly healthy. Take the drive or SSD out yourself, put it in an antistatic bag, and post that alone. Sending a whole laptop does not work here because internal drives are not removed from machines. If the machine is a tablet, an ultraslim or an Apple Silicon Mac, check before you post anything: where the flash is soldered to the logic board, the job is outside what this lab takes in and you will be told so straight away.
Every case file here is written up from a real enquiry handled for households and businesses across Liverpool, Merseyside and the wider North West, anonymised so that nobody is identifiable. Each one gives the reasoning behind the diagnosis, the method the fault actually called for, and the equipment it was worked on.
A drive a Mac will not open is read directly on recovery equipment, past the enclosure and past the filesystem
A large drive that will not register has a firmware, board or mechanical cause, and only a direct read separates them
A drive that has been taken out of a machine is read on its own, whatever it was doing while it was still in one
The diagnostic is free and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure is fixed in writing, and logical faults run on no fix, no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.