The tower that has stored every family photo since the London Olympics, the workstation holding the accounts, the all-in-one in the study: when one of them gives up, the disk inside almost never has. Two screws, two cables, a quote by phone or with the free online diagnostic, and the drive is in the post from anywhere between Highworth and Faringdon.
Free diagnostic on every desktop computer job. One fixed quote in writing before any work starts.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Electronic and mechanical failures and chip-level work are 50% upfront, with the balance only if we recover your data, while BitLocker, ransomware, DVR and forensic jobs are paid upfront once you accept the fixed quote. You'll find full pricing on the data recovery cost page.
Every desktop computer job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault, and these twenty cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
A failing disk or damaged system files; either way, the documents are extracted from an image of the drive.
Mechanical failure in progress: every restart from here is borrowed time against the platters.
The drive's electronics burn out along with the power supply; PCB repair and a ROM transfer restore access.
Dropped off the bus through firmware failure, dead electronics or a broken connection, all of which can be traced on the bench.
Most of the old data survives a fresh Windows install, as long as the machine isn't kept in use.
Shift-Delete included: files are recoverable as long as the freed space has not been claimed by new writes.
Spreading bad sectors freeze the whole machine; hardware imagers read around the damage instead of through it.
Encrypted desktops are imaged and examined on the isolated bench, looking at remnants and shadow copies first.
A striped pair doubles the ways to fail; both members are imaged before any reassembly work.
Retired towers with PATA and SCSI disks inside: the legacy adapters have never left this shelf.
ST1000DM010 and ST2000DM008 drives are the most common clickers in family towers, by a long way.
WD10EZEX boards cook during storms; a matched donor PCB with the ROM moved across sorts it out.
An AIO is really a laptop stood upright behind glass: harder to open, but just the same to recover.
Decommissioned fleet drives sit in boxes for years, then refuse to spin; they are imaged gently, with motor trouble expected.
The wrong modular PSU cables and static handling kill drives in their first week; electronics repair brings them back.
Toshiba's budget-build favourite turns up with worn heads in self-assembled towers, and we keep donor stacks in stock for it.
A drive knocked while its screws were still loose starts clicking days later; the heads are replaced and the surface is imaged around the damaged area.
A case packed with years of dust runs its drives hot for thousands of hours, and the wear arrives all at once.
Recent towers boot from an M.2 module that can fail as suddenly as any memory stick, and the NVMe bench deals with those.
WD Blacks in workstations clock up punishing duty cycles; when they start to falter, imaging is planned around the weak heads.
A tower is the easiest patient there is: side panel off, two screws out, SATA and power unplugged, get a quote first, and the drive is ready for the post. From there it is a standard HDD or SSD recovery. All-in-ones hide laptop internals behind the screen and can be awkward to open, so ring us 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 order.
It happens every week around Swindon: a slow PC goes in for a service, comes back like new, and the documents folder has gone with the old install. The good news is that a reinstall only rewrites part of the platter surface; underneath the new system, most of the old files are still exactly where they were. Every extra hour of use eats into them, though, so shut it down today, get a quote by phone or with the free online diagnostic, and send the drive.
A desktop's disk gets the full weight of the drive lab, with the legacy shelf there for the older towers:
Firmware-level access for whatever drive the tower held, whatever its age, size or interface.
Unstable desktop drives are captured in full under hardware retry discipline, never left to a hopeful software loop.
Clicking tower drives get donor head assemblies on the head-swap bench, with parts matched from indexed stock.
IDE/PATA, SCSI and first-generation SATA: twenty years of retired family PCs can still be read here.
The drive is captured in full on hardware imagers first, and recovery runs on that copy, never on the tired original.
Read-only from the moment of booking-in: nothing on this bench can write to your drive.
Office fleets, gaming builds and the tower that has sat by the printer for ten years: inside, it is almost always a Barracuda ST2000DM008, a WD Blue WD10EZEX or a Toshiba P300 HDWD110, and those three account for most of the clicking and surge jobs this lab handles. An all-in-one still counts as a desktop on this bench, even though the internals behind the glass are pure laptop.
The iMedia was the supermarket family PC of its day, and its disks turn up here in two ways: freshly taken out of a tower that stopped starting, or bare and unlabelled, kept in a drawer for years in case they might matter one day. The classic self-inflicted damage is a factory restore done to cure slowness, burying years of photos under a new Windows install; most of them survive underneath and come out cleanly from a complete sector image. Older IDE and early SATA drives connect through the legacy shelf and are imaged at the gentle pace their age calls for.
Pavilions from box rooms and OptiPlex and EliteDesk fleets from offices keep this bench steadily busy. Compaq recovery still comes in too: Presario-era towers whose IDE disks sat in drawers for a decade, often after a Compaq recovery disc reinstall buried the very documents it was supposed to protect, and a full sector image brings them back. Decommissioned drives follow their own pattern: put away during an office clear-out, needed years later for the accounts or drawings on them, and now refusing to spin after standing idle so long. Home towers arrive after a storm takes out the power supply and the drive electronics together, or once Windows freezes at its logo because bad sectors are scattered across the disk. Once you have a quote, the bare drive is all you need to post; it is imaged first, repaired where needed, and the data is handed over on new media.
Get a quote first, by phone or with the free online diagnostic. The drive has to be taken out of your computer before you send it to us. Not sure how? 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. Get a quote first, then post the bare drive and nothing else, because removing it is done at your end, not ours. Postage stays low, the tower never leaves the house, and the drive actually travels more safely without the case around it.
Most customers get a quote first, by phone or with the free online diagnostic, and then 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 (from a server, every disk, each labelled with its bay), as we don't offer a drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (for example T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops), only drives that can be removed and sent to us. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Oxford Data Recovery and we'll ring you as soon as we've diagnosed your media.
Not sure what to send? Ring 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.