Warrington earns its living from the fact that the M6 crosses the M62 here. Freight moves through the town all day, and so does the data telling everyone where the freight is, right up until a disc in a transport office gives out and nobody can prove what left the yard on Tuesday.
Warrington jobs are diagnosed free. One fixed figure in writing before any work starts, and £300 + VAT covers a single drive or SSD.
Haulage and distribution produce the most urgent calls from WA1 to WA5. Transport management systems, tachograph downloads, scanned delivery notes, customer rate files, all of it on a server in a yard office at Omega, Woolston or one of the estates off the A57. When that stops, invoicing stops with it, and a week of unbilled work is a real number. The advice at that point is unglamorous but it matters: power the unit down, do not let it rebuild, label each disc with its bay and send the complete set insured, because an array that has been rebuilt over itself is a materially harder job than one that was simply switched off.
Birchwood sends a different sort of parcel. The business parks there are full of engineering, energy and software firms, and what fails is usually a workstation NVMe holding a fortnight of uncommitted work, or a project archive on a NAS in a comms room. SSDs and NVMe drives are quoted at exactly the same £300 + VAT as a spinning disk, and they fail differently: no warning noise, no gradual decline, just a drive that was there yesterday and is not enumerated today.
The town itself supplies the ordinary run of work. Shops and offices around Golden Square and Bank Quay, trades and small firms in Stockton Heath, Latchford, Grappenhall, Penketh and Great Sankey, a good many household externals full of photographs, and camera cards from Friday nights at the Halliwell Jones watching the Wire. Warrington was making wire when the Ship Canal was cut through the south of the town, and the record of most of that has ended up on discs somewhere.
Nothing is collected. The bench sits at Peter House on Oxford Street in Manchester, and while reception there will take a drive handed in during office hours, there is no counter anywhere in Warrington. What works is a parcel: the bare drive, padded so it cannot move, tracked and insured, next working day from any Warrington post office. A courier of your own is equally fine so long as you book it and pay for it.
The diagnostic is free and completes within 2 working days of arrival, ending in a call and one fixed written figure. Single drive or SSD £300 + VAT. Card or USB pen drive £250 + VAT. RAID, NAS and servers from £500 + VAT, rising with the disc count. CCTV or DVR £400 + VAT. BitLocker £400 + VAT. Forensic investigation with a written report £800 + VAT. Logical faults are no fix, no fee. Physical, mechanical, electronic, board-level, water and fire damage take 50% of the quote up front, the balance only if the data is proven back. Ring 0800 689 0668 free, Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm, from Birchwood, Culcheth, Lymm, Appleton or anywhere else in the borough.
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.