The tower that's archived every family photo since the London Olympics, the workstation carrying the accounts, the all-in-one in the study — when one gives up, the disk inside almost never has. Two screws, two cables, and it's in the post from anywhere between Highworth and Faringdon.
Free diagnostic on every desktop computer job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
Every desktop computer job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twenty cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
A sick disk or mangled system files; either way the documents extract from an image of the drive.
Mechanical failure in progress — every restart from here is borrowed against the platters.
The drive's electronics burn alongside the power supply; PCB repair and a ROM transfer restore access.
Fallen off the bus through firmware failure, dead electronics or a broken connection — all traceable on the bench.
Most of the old data outlives a fresh Windows — right up until the machine keeps getting used.
Shift-Delete included: recoverable while the freed space stays unclaimed by new writes.
Spreading bad sectors freeze the whole machine; hardware imagers read around the rot instead of through it.
Encrypted desktops are imaged and examined on the isolated bench, remnants and shadow copies first.
A striped pair doubles the ways to fail; both members are imaged before any reassembly arithmetic.
Retired towers with PATA and SCSI disks inside — the legacy adapters have never left this shelf.
ST1000DM010 and ST2000DM008 drives are the most frequent clickers in family towers, bar none.
WD10EZEX boards cook during storms; a matched donor PCB with the ROM carried across sorts it.
An AIO is a laptop stood upright behind glass — harder to open, identical to recover.
Decommissioned fleet drives sit boxed for years, then balk at spinning — imaged gently, motor trouble expected.
Wrong modular PSU cables and static handling kill drives in week one — electronics repair brings them back.
Toshiba's budget-build favourite turns up head-worn in self-assembled towers — donor stacks are stocked for it.
A drive bumped while screws were still loose develops clicks days later — heads replaced, surface imaged around the bruise.
A case packed with years of dust runs its drives hot for thousands of hours — the wear arrives all at once.
Recent towers boot from an M.2 module that can quit as suddenly as any stick — dealt with by the NVMe bench.
WD Blacks in workstations rack up punishing duty cycles; when they falter, imaging is scheduled around the weak heads.
A tower is the friendliest patient there is: side panel off, two screws, unplug SATA and power, and the drive is ready for the post — from there it's a standard HDD or SSD recovery. All-in-ones hide laptop internals behind the display and can be stubborn to open; ring first if yours is glued shut. Workstations with paired disks or motherboard RAID need one detail from you — which drive sat on which port — so the pair can be imaged and put back together in the right sequence.
It happens weekly around Swindon: a sluggish PC goes in for a service, comes back factory-fresh, and the documents folder went with the old install. The good news is that a reinstall rewrites only part of the platter surface; below the new system, most of the old files sit exactly where they were. Every further hour of use chews into them, though — so shut it down today and send the drive.
A desktop's disk gets the full weight of the drive lab, with the legacy shelf catching the older towers:
Firmware-level access for whichever drive the tower held, whatever its age, size or interface.
Unstable desktop drives captured whole under hardware retry discipline, never abandoned to a hopeful software loop.
Clicking tower drives get donor head assemblies under filtered air, parts matched from indexed stock.
IDE/PATA, SCSI and first-generation SATA — twenty years of retired family PCs stay readable here.
The drive is captured completely on hardware imagers first; recovery runs on that copy, never the tired original.
Read-only from the moment of booking-in — no process on this bench can write to your drive.
Office fleets, gaming builds and the tower that's lived by the printer for a decade — inside, it's almost always a Barracuda ST2000DM008, a WD Blue WD10EZEX or a Toshiba P300 HDWD110, and those three cover most of the clicking and surge tickets this lab raises. An all-in-one still counts as a desktop on this bench, though the internals behind the glass are pure laptop.
The iMedia was the supermarket family PC of its era, and its disks turn up here two ways: still screwed inside a tower that stopped starting, or bare and unlabelled, saved in a drawer for years on the theory they might matter someday. The classic self-inflicted injury is a factory restore performed to cure slowness, entombing years of photos under a new Windows — most survive down below and come out cleanly via a complete sector image. Elderly IDE and first-wave SATA mechanisms connect through the legacy shelf and are imaged at the unhurried pace their age deserves.
Pavilions from box rooms and OptiPlex and EliteDesk fleets from offices keep this bench in steady employment. Decommission cases follow their own script: a drive put away during an office clear-out, then needed years afterwards for the accounts or drawings it holds, and now unwilling to spin having stood idle so long. Home towers arrive after a storm fells the power supply and the drive electronics together, or once Windows freezes at its logo because bad sectors litter the disk. The bare drive is all that needs posting — imaged first, mended where required, data handed over on new media.
The drive needs to be removed from your computer before you send it in to us. Unsure? Phone us on 0800 689 0668, or a local PC repair shop will remove it for a small fee.
Side panel off, two mounting screws out, SATA and power leads unplugged — post the bare drive and nothing else, because extraction happens at your end rather than ours. Postage stays low, the tower never leaves the house, and the drive actually travels safer without the case around it.
Most customers post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Oxford Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.