Laptops die at the worst moments — dark at the power button, looping on the maker's logo, wearing a cup of tea. The machine may be finished; 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 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 laptop job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twenty cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Board or charging failure with an untouched drive inside — grim for the laptop, excellent news for the data.
Corrosion starts its clock within days; the storage nearly always escapes if it's pulled out promptly.
The hard drive's heads caught the landing — donor-stack work under filtered air comes next.
A failing drive or a broken Windows; either way the files leave through the drive, not the operating system.
The system is wrecked and the documents aren't — one of the simpler extractions on the list.
Modern machines exit silently when the M.2 stick inside quits — no click, no warning, just a boot error.
Clogged fans slow-cook the drive tray; the data comes off before the heat finishes the job.
Everything runs except the panel — the drive comes out at your end and images without drama.
A 'repair' reinstall flattens the user accounts; recovery mines whatever regions the installer left alone.
Encrypted storage recovers normally when you hold the key or password — mention it in the first call.
A failing hinge levers the motherboard until it cracks, leaving the storage completely unhurt.
HP's start-up warning is the drive forecasting its own death — power down and send the drive, not 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 — imaged weakest-head-last on the rigs.
Unbranded USB-C bricks spike the board and occasionally the drive electronics — both have established repair paths.
A ballooning cell presses on the drive or M.2 stick above it — stop charging immediately and have the storage taken out.
Screen-first crush damage rarely reaches the storage; the drive is extracted from the wreckage and imaged normally.
WD's popular laptop NVMe stick can vanish from the BIOS overnight — service-mode work once the module is out.
Summer heat soak pushes drives past their limits; thermal ageing shows up weeks later as read errors and stalls.
Repeated power loss at the worst moments corrupts file tables by degrees — rebuilt from a full image of the drive.
HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, MSI, Surface: the badge 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, and post the drive alone — extraction has to happen at your end, as pulling drives from 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 the storage down, and soldered chips are outside what we recover. Phone 0800 689 0668 if you're not certain which type you own.
A fall can wreck a spinning drive's heads while the laptop looks showroom-fresh; if it clicks or freezes at boot since the accident, cut the power and keep it cut. Spills run on a corrosion clock — skip the rice, skip the radiator, skip 'just checking if it starts'. Get the storage out quickly (or bring the machine to someone who can) and the odds stay excellent, because the drive usually survives the event that finishes the computer.
A laptop can hide any storage format of the last twenty years, so the bench keeps every door open:
Your posted drive or SSD is logged at arrival, handled on anti-static workflows throughout, and imaged before recovery begins.
M.2 NVMe and SATA, mSATA, 2230/2242 stubs, Apple blades, vintage IDE — the drawer connects whatever your laptop carried, natively.
A failed laptop drive receives the same firmware-level access as any drive on the main bench.
Head swaps for dropped machines happen under filtered air, with donors pulled from the matched library.
Spill-affected drives and connectors get corrosion treatment and ultrasonic cleaning until they read again.
Each drive that arrives is imaged read-only ahead of any other step being taken.
Gaming rigs with a drive and a stick, sealed ultrabooks, the family Pavilion on its tenth birthday — inside they carry the MQ01ABF050-class 2.5" drives and SN570-class M.2 modules described on the dedicated drive pages, and the bare module is what needs posting. The standing exceptions: storage soldered to the board is out of scope, and no phones or tablets under any circumstances.
Lifebooks from office fleets and Amilos from home studies keep emerging from Wiltshire cupboards years after Fujitsu left the UK laptop trade, typically holding a decade of documents that never got copied anywhere else. Their 2.5-inch drives age on schedule — firmware that hangs, heads that slow, sector damage in clusters — and once the drive is unscrewed and posted, the recovery is routine mechanical work: fragile regions imaged last, donors fitted only where heads have genuinely died. The Lifebook itself never needs the trip.
A modern VivoBook or ZenBook exits in silence: the M.2 module fails, 'no boot device' appears, and every file waits unbothered in the NAND until a service-mode session or chip-level read collects it. Toshiba's Satellite generation goes out audibly instead — its MQ01ABF050-era drives wear heads down, slow to a walk, and tick when pushed. Both roads finish at this bench: module or drive out, imaged, data returned. The sole refusals are the thinnest machines with storage soldered down, which no honest lab can promise on.
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.
Free the drive or M.2 stick before posting — taking drives out of machines isn't something we do at this end. On most laptops a single base panel and a handful of screws stand in the way; wrap the bare unit in foil or an anti-static bag and post just that. Machines with storage soldered to the board are the exception we can't take, as only removable media is workable here.
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.