Timing is the cruellest part. The machine dies on the morning something is due, or drops into a restart loop the one evening you finally sat down to copy the photographs somewhere safe, or takes a mug of tea before nine. The laptop itself may well be past saving. Judging by what crosses this bench, the storage inside it usually is not, and the storage is where your work actually lives.
Every laptop job is diagnosed free. One fixed figure follows in writing, agreed before a screwdriver comes out of the drawer.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Every band is listed on the data recovery cost page.
Matching the symptom to the fault underneath is the first job on any laptop, and after twenty-odd years these thirty account for very nearly everything that arrives.
The charging circuit and the power side of the board tend to go together, and neither of them is the storage. A bad week for the laptop. An ordinary week for the files.
Drying the machine out does not stop the corrosion, it only hides it. A drive lifted clear within a day or two nearly always comes through clean. Leave it sitting in the chassis for three weeks and you are betting against chemistry.
The platters were turning when the machine hit the floor, so the heads took the shock. That means donor parts fitted in filtered air. It does not mean another go at switching it on, because every attempt shaves a little more off the surface.
It may be the disk and it may be Windows, and the route out is identical either way. We image the drive on a bench and take the files off that copy, rather than asking a system that has already fallen over to hand them across.
Windows is in pieces and the documents are not. Provided the disk underneath is sound, this is one of the easier jobs listed on this page.
Flash gives no warning noise. One boot, one error message, and that is the entire performance. The M.2 module is unscrewed and carried across to the flash bench, where it joins the queue with every other solid-state case.
Dust felts the fan over and the heat has nowhere left to go except through the drive bay. The damage is slow and it adds up. Far better to lift the data off while the machine still starts than to wait for the day it does not.
A laptop nobody can use, wrapped around a drive in perfect health. Undo the base panel, lift the drive out, post it on its own, and it images here without a word of complaint.
The cure wiped out the accounts. An installer only touches a small part of a disk, and it is the untouched majority where the work gets done.
Encryption is no obstacle at all when the key or the password arrives alongside the drive. Say so on the first phone call. A BitLocker job is £400 + VAT, and the one that runs late is always the one that has to stop halfway while somebody hunts through old emails for a recovery key.
Months of forcing a tight hinge open eventually cracks one corner of the mainboard. The storage lives in a different part of the chassis and comes out none the wiser.
The machine is reading you the drive's own warning notice. Switch it off there and then, take the drive out, and keep the rest of the laptop for spares if that suits you.
The sensor parks the heads when it gets enough notice. Caught mid-write it often does not, and the outcome is a head swap with matched donors.
Toshiba's 1TB laptop workhorse fades rather than dies. Reads slow to a crawl, then a faint tick arrives. Imaging hardware copes with this well, working the strongest heads first and saving the weakest until there is nothing else left to read.
Unbranded USB-C bricks take out mainboards, and the drive electronics sitting behind them sometimes go the same way. Both are routine here. Note that board repair is invasive work, so it needs 50% of the quote upfront and sits outside no fix, no fee.
The cell grows and pushes on whatever sits above it, which on plenty of chassis is the drive or the M.2 module. Two steps in this order: stop charging it today, get the storage out this week.
The screen absorbs almost all of that. Storage sits low and central and generally escapes untouched. The drive comes out of a wrecked machine and images as though it had spent the day in a drawer, which as far as it is concerned it did.
Shut down normally on Friday, invisible to the BIOS by Monday. WD SN570s and SN770s do exactly this. The module goes into service mode on the flash bench, and it usually turns out to have a great deal left in it.
Sun through glass with no airflow cooks storage gently. The bill turns up weeks later as read errors, long after anybody would think to connect the two.
A loose DC jack interrupts writes at random, so file tables degrade in small instalments rather than all at once. The machine gets steadily odder before it stops. Everything is stood back up from a full image, never from the live disk.
A machine that never quite slept, zipped into a case designed to insulate it, holds an enormous amount of heat. One afternoon like that ages the storage measurably, and it is never only one afternoon.
Half the files reached the new SSD. The old drive was wiped on Tuesday, ready for resale. The gap between those two events is where the panic lives. A wipe of that sort removes pointers rather than data, so there is something to read below it, and the less that disk is touched from here on, the better the result.
Squeeze a thin machine anywhere and the board takes the strain. The solder joints under the M.2 module are where it shows up first. Reflowed, then imaged on the flash bench like any other module.
Windows cannot locate the account and has improvised an empty one instead. Nothing has been deleted. The folders are still on the disk and we lift them off it directly, without asking the operating system for permission.
Soldered flash wears out in the same way as any other flash and stops in the same way too. Storage soldered to a board is outside what we take on. That is worth saying here, plainly, rather than after you have paid for postage.
Some laptops pair a fast little module with a big slow disk and present the pair to Windows as one drive. Kill the small half and the pairing metadata goes with it, leaving the large disk looking unformatted. We image both, unpick the pairing in software, and the files turn out to have been sitting there the whole time.
Consumer clone software meets a dying disk and spends nine hours hammering the same bad sectors. What reaches us afterwards is in worse condition than what went into that shop. We work from whatever survives, and there is normally more of it than anyone has told the owner to hope for.
Two things wrong with the folklore. The liquid stays exactly where it is and carries on eating metal, and warm air drives it further into the connectors. Getting the drive out and into the post beats any drying ritual, and doing it on day one beats doing it on day ten.
A Windows shutdown is usually a hibernation with the lights turned off. Cut the power in that state, or mount the disk from a second machine, and the file structures end up describing a moment that has already passed. Rebuilding happens from an image and from nowhere else.
That one retaining screw goes missing during upgrades far more often than anybody will admit to. The module then sits at an angle, contact comes and goes, and writes get cut off in mid-air. It looks like a dying drive and it is a missing screw. The free diagnostic separates those two, and it takes two working days from the day the module arrives.
Whatever brand is printed above the keyboard, the work is identical, because the only piece anyone here needs is the small disk or M.2 module tucked behind the base panel. Acer laptop data recovery makes the point neatly: a Swift or an Aspire with a dead SN570 module goes through precisely the same process as a Dell Latitude with a dead SN570 module, and the same holds for HP, Lenovo, Asus, MSI and the Surface range. Getting that panel off falls to you rather than to us, since pulling drives out of machines is not something offered from this address, and any computer shop in the city will release one for a few pounds if you would rather not own a screwdriver. Post the storage by itself and leave the rest of the laptop where it is. One caution deserves attention: a lot of thin ultrabooks have their flash soldered straight onto the mainboard, and soldered chips fall outside what gets recovered here. If you cannot tell which sort is in front of you, ring 0800 689 0668 with the model number and it is settled before a single screw comes out.
A knock that leaves the case looking perfectly fine is still enough to drop the heads onto the platters, so any machine that ticks, or sits at the manufacturer logo and goes no further after an accident, wants powering off and leaving off. The damage comes on the second and third attempt, not the first. Spills run on a different clock. From the moment liquid gets inside, corrosion starts, and none of the household remedies wins that race. Rice takes up nothing of consequence. A radiator dries the water and leaves the residue baked in place. Pressing the power button to see whether it survived lies behind a fair share of the genuine total losses that reach this bench. Take the storage out quickly, or find somebody who will do it for you, and the odds stay well in your favour.
A laptop might be hiding a 2006 IDE disk or a 2024 NVMe module, so the bench has to cover the whole span:
Every unit is logged the day it lands, handled on a grounded mat, and imaged end to end before recovery work starts. Nobody gets that order rearranged for them, because that order is what stops drives being ruined.
M.2 in both SATA and NVMe form, mSATA, the short 2242 and 2230 modules, Apple blades, and IDE going back two decades. Whatever the laptop had inside it connects natively.
Laptop drives get firmware-level access on the same equipment the server work runs on. Physically small does not mean straightforward, and it is not handled as though it does.
Dropped machines need their heads replaced in filtered air. Donors come off catalogued shelves and are matched on model and firmware revision, rather than picked because the label looks similar.
Spill jobs are neutralised, bathed and dried until the board reads steadily. Imaging waits until then, because an intermittent connection during a capture does more harm than no connection at all.
Read-only is enforced in hardware from the moment the drive is plugged in. There is no route through this workflow by which a customer drive could be written to.
Fleet ThinkPads out of the offices behind the waterfront, Acer Swifts and Aspires from student houses near LJMU, gaming MSIs, and the Pavilion that has sat in a back bedroom in Aintree since 2016. What is inside them is a short list either way. If it spins, expect an MQ01ABD100 or a WD10SPZX. If it does not, expect an SN570 or an SN770. Both classes have pages of their own. Acer is worth naming on its own account, because those machines sell in volume to students and get carried a good deal further than most: a Swift with a dead module is handled exactly like anything else with a dead module. Send the bare drive or module and keep the laptop. One drive is £300 + VAT and the diagnostic costs nothing. Two limits, stated once so nobody wastes a trip to the post office: soldered storage is out, and we do not take phones or tablets at all.
Acer sells hard into the student market and into households watching the budget, so Swifts, Aspires and Nitros arrive here in numbers, and they arrive with rough lives behind them. Halls, lecture theatres, the 86 bus, the kitchen floor. An older Aspire holds a plain 2.5-inch disk that fails with a click and needs donor heads in filtered air. A newer Swift holds an M.2 module, often an SN570 or one of the DRAM-less budget designs, and that gives no warning whatsoever before it stops responding. Those go to the flash bench for service-mode work or a chip-level read. Either route finishes the same way: storage out, image taken, dissertation returned. The only Acers we turn away are the thinnest models, where the flash is soldered to the board.
Fujitsu stopped selling laptops here years ago and its machines keep arriving anyway. Lifebooks retired out of office fleets, Amilos out of box rooms, and between them a decade of paperwork that exists in no second copy. The 2.5-inch disks inside them decline on a schedule you could almost set a calendar by: firmware hangs to begin with, then heads losing their edge, then sector damage turning up in patches. Unscrew the drive, post the drive, and what follows is ordinary mechanical recovery. Fragile regions are left until the end of the capture, and donors are only brought in when a head has genuinely died rather than as a first move. The laptop itself never has to leave the shelf it is sitting on.
A VivoBook or a ZenBook fails without making a sound. The M.2 module stops answering, the machine reports that there is nothing to boot from, and everything is still sitting in the NAND, waiting on a service-mode session or a read taken at chip level. Satellites from the Toshiba years are far noisier about it. An MQ-generation disk like the MQ01ABD100 loses head performance by degrees: reads drop to a shuffle, then a tick appears under load. Two very different noises, one destination. Storage out, image taken, files back on fresh media. The exception in both ranges is the thinnest chassis, where the flash is soldered to the board. Those get declined, because a promise about them would not be a promise we could keep.
Get the drive out of the machine first, because the bare drive is all that should reach us. Not sure how it comes out? Ring 0800 689 0668 and someone will talk you through it, or any computer shop will do it for very little.
The drive or the M.2 module has to be out of the machine before it travels, because stripping laptops down is not something we do at this end. On most models it is one base panel and six or eight screws. Any repair shop in the city will do it for a few pounds if you would rather not. The bare unit wants an anti-static bag, or a sheet of kitchen foil at a push, and nothing else should go into the box alongside it. Post it tracked and insured to Manchester Data Recovery, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, roughly 35 miles along the M62, or book your own courier. There is no collection anywhere in this network, so getting it to us is your part of the job. Soldered storage is the one thing we cannot take on.
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.
Diagnosis free, one figure written down, and £300 + VAT covers a single drive or SSD. Start online or ring.