Runcorn is really two towns fastened together: the old streets by the docks where the Bridgewater Canal came down to the river, and the estates and expressways of the new town laid over the hill behind. Both send drives, and they send different ones.
Runcorn jobs are diagnosed free. One fixed figure in writing before any work starts, and £300 + VAT covers a single drive or SSD.
The science and technology side is the most distinctive part of WA7. Daresbury sits just up the road, and the small research, instrumentation and software firms in and around the science park generate exactly the sort of data that is painful to lose: instrument output, simulation runs, project archives on a NAS in a cupboard, and a workstation NVMe with a fortnight of analysis on it that was going to be backed up on Friday. Add the process plants at Weston Point and the distribution and light industrial units at Astmoor and Whitehouse, and the working half of the town is covered.
The new town estates send the domestic half. Palacefields, Murdishaw, Castlefields, Halton Lea and Beechwood produce the ordinary and entirely serious losses: an external drive with every photograph a family owns, a home business whose invoicing lives on one laptop, a student machine that will not start. The old town round Halton Village and the docks adds small firms, trades and the odd camera recorder from a yard.
Everything reaches the bench by post and nothing is collected. Take the bare drive out of the machine, pad it so it cannot move inside the box, and send it tracked and insured to Manchester Data Recovery, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, which from Runcorn is next working day. A courier of your own booking and at your own cost does the same job. There is no shop to walk into in Runcorn, though reception at the Manchester lab does take drives handed in during office hours. Storage soldered onto a mainboard is the one type of media that cannot be worked on at all.
Diagnosis is free and finishes within 2 working days of arrival, ending in one fixed written figure with the odds stated plainly. Any single drive or SSD, NVMe included, is £300 + VAT. Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT. NAS boxes, arrays and servers start at £500 + VAT and rise with the disc count. CCTV or DVR work is £400 + VAT, BitLocker £400 + VAT, and a forensic investigation with a written report £800 + VAT. No fix, no fee applies to logical faults only. Mechanical, electronic, board-level and chip-level work, along with water and fire damage, takes 50% of the quote up front and the balance only if the data comes back. Frodsham, Helsby, Preston Brook, Sandymoor and Daresbury post in on the same 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.