Three questions, answered by clicking: what the media is, who built it, and what it has started doing. Back comes the fault it usually turns out to be, the single action worth taking before anything else, and an honest range for how long that class of repair runs. Nothing is asked of you until the end, and even then only so an engineer can confirm it by telephone.
Working out what is wrong is not a chargeable service here. Not online, and not on the bench either. An invoice only exists once you have read a fixed figure and said yes to it.
Your own figure is settled once an engineer has examined the media, and reaching that point is not chargeable. Where the fault turns out to be logical, meaning files deleted, a volume formatted or a file system that has come apart, the job carries no fix, no fee and an empty result means an empty invoice. Where the bench finds the electronics, the mechanics or the media itself damaged, donor parts and clean-bench hours have to be bought before anything can be read, so half the quoted figure is settled first. Both footings appear on the written quote before a single screw is turned.
The label reads Manchester Data Recovery, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN. Written questions reach the bench at support@manchester-datarecovery.co.uk. Paperwork: ↓ shipping form (PDF) · ↓ terms and conditions (PDF)
Four fields and somebody rings you back with a considered view rather than a sales pitch. No obligation attaches to any of it.
An engineer reads it himself and will be in touch shortly. Already decided to post the media? The label reads Manchester Data Recovery, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN.
Sooner say it out loud than click it? The freephone line is 0800 689 0668, open Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm, and support@manchester-datarecovery.co.uk reaches the same people. A description in your own words is worth as much as any of these buttons.
Two things decide what you pay: what the media is, and what has actually gone wrong inside it. Neither one is how much the files matter to you. Three bands cover the overwhelming majority of what arrives, and your own figure is written down once an engineer has looked at the hardware.
Pen drives, and cards in every format: SD, microSD, CompactFlash.
One disk, spinning or solid state, wherever it came from. NVMe blades sit here too.
Boxes with several disks in them, counted a member at a time.
Three more bands sit outside those. A recorder disk pulled from a CCTV or DVR unit is £400 + VAT; unlocking a BitLocker volume is also £400 + VAT; and forensic casework carrying a written report is £800 + VAT, settled in full before it starts, with unusually large or multi-device matters scoped and quoted separately. On the risk side, the line runs between logical and physical. Logical faults keep no fix, no fee — files deleted, a volume formatted, a file system in pieces, or sound hardware the machine will not acknowledge. Physical, electronic, water and fire damage do not. Those want a donor board or controller, a head and motor transplant, chips lifted off a card, or work down at firmware and service-area level, all of which spend money before a single sector is read, so half the quoted figure is settled upfront. A handful of jobs sit above every band on this page: a board burnt past reading, media snapped clean through, a set spanning a shelf of disks. Those are quoted individually, in writing, and nothing starts until you have read the figure.
What happens at the bench is an engineering examination, not five minutes with a downloaded scanner. It runs in a fixed order, because each stage decides whether the next one is safe to attempt, and it closes 2 working days from arrival rather than sooner.
Power first, always. Rails, bridge and board are tested, and the drive's unique ROM is copied off and kept safe before anything else is risked.
Heads, bearings and platter surfaces are assessed while the drive is still. Nothing is asked to attempt a difficult read until that verdict exists.
Translator and service area are examined on the PC-3000. Faults living at this depth are wholly invisible to anything running on a normal computer.
A measured pass on imaging hardware establishes what proportion of the platters or the NAND will actually surrender data, and where the weak regions sit.
Structures are mapped so the answer is not a percentage but a list: which of your folders survive whole, which are damaged, and which are gone.
One price, set against the fault that was actually found. Accept it and work starts; refuse it and the media goes back. Neither costs you anything.
Storage fails in a small number of ways, and each of them announces itself fairly consistently. A repeated tick is a head stack that cannot find its bearings. A steady beep about once a second is a spindle motor failing to spin up and trying again. A device that appears in the list but reports the wrong capacity has a controller in trouble. A volume the machine offers to format has a broken file system sitting on perfectly good hardware. None of that is guesswork; it is pattern recognition built out of a long queue of previous jobs.
So what the wizard does is match your three answers against that catalogue and hand back what the combination usually means, what it implies for the odds, and the single action most likely to protect them. It does not pretend to be an examination. It cannot see whether a platter is scored, whether the translator has collapsed, or how many sectors have quietly gone bad, and any tool claiming otherwise from three clicks is selling something.
The read-out is also blunt where bluntness is the useful answer. Where a symptom is urgent, it says stop using the device now and explains why continuing costs you. Where a fault is genuinely outside what this bench takes on, soldered flash being the standing example, it says so on the screen rather than after you have paid for postage.
Take the power off. It is dull advice and it is the most valuable thing on this page. A failing mechanism damages itself further every time it is asked to spin. A deleted file survives only until something writes over the space it occupied. A struggling solid-state device rewrites its own translation tables in the background whenever it is powered. Every one of those clocks stops the moment the device is unplugged, and none of them starts again while it sits in a padded box waiting for the post.
Almost every job on this bench came in by tracked, insured post. It is the calmest way to move a drive that is already struggling, and a parcel handed in anywhere on Merseyside usually reaches the bench the following working day.
Still screwed inside a laptop, tower, MacBook, iMac, server or a CCTV recorder? Take the drive out and post that on its own. We do not strip machines here, and any computer shop will do it in a few minutes. The one job nobody can take on is flash soldered straight to a logic board, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a handful of very slim laptops: if the storage will not unbolt, there is nothing to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Manchester Data Recovery. It is roughly 35 miles from Liverpool along the M62 if you fancy the run, and next working day by tracked post if you do not. We ring or email the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes 2 working days after that.
Not sure what belongs in the parcel? Call 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or step through the free online diagnostic first.
Pack the bare media well, put your name and a contact number in the box with it, and buy a tracked, insured service.