Laptops die at the worst moments: dead at the power button, looping on the maker's logo, or wearing a cup of tea. The machine may well be finished, but the drive inside seldom is. Students, home workers and business fleets around Swindon and Royal Wootton Bassett send us the storage, and the files come back.
Free diagnostic on every laptop job. One fixed quote in writing before any work is done.
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 laptop job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault, and these twenty cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
A board or charging failure with the drive inside untouched: grim news for the laptop, excellent news for the data.
Corrosion starts its clock within days, but the storage nearly always escapes if it's pulled out promptly.
The hard drive's heads caught the landing, so donor-stack work on the head-swap bench comes next.
Either the drive is failing or Windows is broken; whichever it is, the files leave through the drive, not the operating system.
The system is wrecked but the documents aren't, which makes this one of the simpler extractions on the list.
Modern machines go quietly when the M.2 stick inside quits: no click, no warning, just a boot error.
Clogged fans slowly cook the drive tray, and the data comes off before the heat can finish the job.
Everything works except the panel; the drive comes out at your end and images without any drama.
A 'repair' reinstall flattens the user accounts, and recovery mines whatever regions the installer left alone.
Encrypted storage recovers normally as long as you hold the key or password, so mention it on the first call.
A failing hinge levers the motherboard until it cracks, while the storage is left completely unhurt.
HP's start-up warning is the drive forecasting its own death. Power down, get a quote, and post the drive rather than the laptop.
Free-fall protection helps until it doesn't; a spinning drive that lands mid-write still needs donor heads.
Toshiba's everywhere-laptop drive ages into crawling reads and soft ticking, and on our rigs it's imaged weakest head last.
Unbranded USB-C power bricks can spike the board and occasionally the drive electronics, and both faults have well-established repair paths.
A swelling battery cell presses on the drive or M.2 stick sitting above it. Stop charging immediately and have the storage taken out.
Screen-first crush damage rarely reaches the storage; the drive comes out of the wreckage at your end and images normally.
WD's popular laptop NVMe stick can vanish from the BIOS overnight, and service-mode work follows once the module is out.
Summer heat soak pushes drives past their limits, and the thermal ageing shows up weeks later as read errors and stalls.
Repeated power loss at the worst moments corrupts the file tables by degrees, and they're rebuilt from a full image of the drive.
HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, MSI, Surface: the badge on the lid makes no difference, because your data lives on a 2.5-inch disk or M.2 module tucked behind the base panel. Undo that panel, unclip the drive, get a quote by phone or with the free online diagnostic, and post the drive on its own. Removal has to happen at your end, as taking drives out of machines isn't a service we run, and any repair shop in Swindon will do it for pocket money. One caution: certain slim ultrabooks solder their storage down, and soldered chips are outside what we recover. Phone 0800 689 0668 if you're not sure which type you have.
A fall can wreck a spinning drive's heads while the laptop still looks showroom-fresh; if it has clicked or frozen at boot since the accident, cut the power and keep it off. Spills run on a corrosion clock, so skip the rice, skip the radiator and skip 'just checking if it starts'. Get the storage out quickly (or take the machine to a local repair shop that can) and the odds stay excellent, because the drive usually survives whatever finished off the computer.
A laptop can hide almost any storage format from the last twenty years, so the bench keeps every door open:
Your posted drive or SSD is logged on arrival, handled with anti-static workflows throughout, and imaged before any recovery begins.
M.2 NVMe and SATA, mSATA, 2230 and 2242 stubs, Apple blades, vintage IDE: the drawer connects whatever your laptop carried, natively.
A failed laptop drive gets the same firmware-level access as any other drive on the main bench.
Head swaps for dropped machines take place on the head-swap bench, with donors drawn from the matched library.
Drives and connectors hit by spills get corrosion treatment and ultrasonic cleaning until they read again.
Every drive that arrives is imaged read-only before any other step is taken.
Gaming rigs with a drive and a stick, sealed ultrabooks, the family Pavilion that has reached its tenth year: inside, they carry the MQ01ABF050-class 2.5-inch hard drives and SN570-class M.2 modules detailed on their own drive pages. It is just the bare module that needs posting, once you have a quote. The exceptions are any storage soldered onto the motherboard, which is outside our scope, and we accept no phones or tablets at any time.
Fujitsu left the UK laptop market years ago, and a lot of Lifebooks from business premises and Amilo laptops from home users are now sitting in a cupboard somewhere in Wiltshire with around ten years' worth of documents on them that were never copied anywhere else. The 2.5-inch drives inside these laptops deteriorate over time, as you would expect, so the firmware hangs, the heads slow down and sectors get lost in small clusters. After the owner has unscrewed the drive and posted it to us, the recovery is routine mechanical work. When we do this we image the most fragile parts of the disk last, and we only fit donor heads where the heads have actually failed. This means you don't need to send us the Lifebook itself.
A large number of new Asus laptops (such as VivoBooks and ZenBooks) may fail silently and display 'no boot device' on the screen due to a failure of the M.2 module. However, the files stored on the module are still sitting within the NAND memory, waiting for a technician to read them via service mode or chip-level access. Toshiba's Satellite series makes a noise instead, as its MQ01ABF050-era drives wear their heads out over time until they crawl along, and they produce ticking sounds if nudged. Whichever it is, each of these ends up on our bench to have either the module or the drive imaged, so that your files can be returned to you. We can take on nearly every unit sent to us, but there is one exception, which is thin laptops with the storage soldered onto the motherboard, as we cannot honestly promise what could be done on those.
Prior to posting us your drive, please call for a quote or use our free online diagnostic tool. Your drive needs to be removed from your computer before it is posted to us. If you're unsure about how to remove the drive, please feel free to contact us on 0800 689 0668, or alternatively search online for a nearby PC repair shop to remove the drive for a low cost.
Before posting anything to us, please remove the hard drive or M.2 module from your laptop, since we do not remove drives from computers. In most laptops the drive is located underneath a base plate that is fastened with a handful of screws, so simply remove these screws to get to the drive. After getting a quote first (by phone or using our free online diagnostic), please wrap the bare drive on its own in foil or place it in an anti-static bag, and post only the drive to us. We will not accept laptops where the storage is soldered onto the motherboard, because we can only work on removable media.
Most customers start by getting a quote first, by phone or with the free online diagnostic, and then once they have it they post their media to us or send it by courier.
Do the drives come from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV/DVR or server? Only send the drive (or drives) from within the device, and if it is a server, send all the disks labelled with the bay they came from. Don't send the entire unit with its hard drive or SSD still in place, as we do not offer a removal service. We cannot recover data from drives soldered onto the motherboard (for example T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and some of the very thin laptops), only from drives that can be taken out and sent to us. If you aren't certain about the type of drive you have, please give us a ring before posting anything.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Label your parcel for the attention of Oxford Data Recovery, and we will contact you as soon as we determine what the problem is with your media.
Are you unsure what to send? Call us first on 0800 689 0668 before posting anything, or complete our free online diagnostic, and we will help you work out your best course of action.
We give you a free diagnostic and a fixed quote, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Get started now or call the freephone number.