Cammell Laird has been building and mending ships at the narrow end of the Mersey since 1828, and a yard like that runs on drawings. The ones that reach this bench are the modern sort: a CAD archive on a workshop machine that decided not to boot on a Monday morning.
Birkenhead jobs are diagnosed free. One fixed figure in writing before any work starts, and £300 + VAT covers a single drive or SSD.
CH41 and CH42 send engineering work more than anything else. The yard itself, the fabricators and machine shops that supply it, marine electrical and hydraulics firms around the dock estate, and inspection contractors whose entire job is photographs of hull plate, tanks and welds that have to be produced again years later. On top of that come the office parcels from Hamilton Square and Argyle Street, where solicitors, accountants and small agencies work out of buildings that have been there since the town was laid out, and the household drives from Tranmere, Rock Ferry, Prenton, Oxton and Bidston.
Workshop machines have short, hard lives and they fail in recognisable ways. Grinding dust gets everywhere, a tower under a bench takes constant vibration, and a drive that has been running warm for six years in that environment does not give much notice. Portable drives fare worse still: an external dropped onto a steel deck or a concrete floor is head damage, which means the clean-air bench, donor parts and a physical price rather than a logical one. If a drive has been dropped and has started clicking, powering it up again to check is the single most expensive thing you can do to it.
The Queensway tunnel and the ferry both go somewhere useful, but neither goes to the bench, and nothing here is collected. Take the bare drive out, wrap it so nothing rattles, and post it tracked and insured to Manchester Data Recovery, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN; from Birkenhead it arrives the next working day. Use your own courier instead if you prefer, booked and paid for by you. There is no shop on the Wirral to call at.
The diagnostic costs nothing and is finished within 2 working days of arrival, at which point you get one written figure and a straight account of the odds. A single drive or SSD is £300 + VAT. Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT. RAID sets, NAS boxes and servers begin at £500 + VAT and rise with the disc count. CCTV and DVR work is £400 + VAT, BitLocker £400 + VAT, and a forensic investigation with a written report £800 + VAT. Logical recoveries carry no fix, no fee. Anything mechanical, electronic, board-level or chip-level, and anything damaged by water or fire, takes 50% of the quote before the work and the balance only on success. Wallasey, Seacombe, Bebington, Heswall and the rest of the Wirral post in on identical terms, on 0800 689 0668, Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm.
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.
The diagnosis costs nothing, the figure is written down, and a single drive or SSD is £300 + VAT.