Home towers, office workstations and all-in-one PCs — when a desktop stops booting or a drive inside gives up, we get the data back. Slide the drive out and post it in from anywhere in Staines or the surrounding Surrey towns.
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 twelve cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Could be a dying drive, could be mangled system files — either way your documents are lifted straight off the disk.
Those noises are mechanical failure happening in real time; shut it down and resist the urge to reboot.
A storm or a cheap PSU takes out the drive's electronics; board repair plus a ROM transfer puts the data back in reach.
The disk has fallen off the bus entirely — electronics, firmware or simply a failed connection.
Most of the old files sit on beneath the new install; every day the PC keeps running erodes them further.
An emptied recycle bin or a Shift-Delete stays recoverable right up until something writes over it.
One bad-sector patch can freeze an entire PC; hardware imagers simply read around the damage.
An infected desktop is imaged first, then the data extracted clean — our ransomware page covers the detail.
A striped pair means twice the chances of failure; both members are imaged before any rebuild is attempted.
Retired machines full of IDE and SCSI disks still read here — the right adapters never left the shelf.
Barracuda and WD Blue desktop drives fail heads after years of duty — clean-bench head swaps from matched donors.
Older Fujitsu Esprimo and Packard Bell iMedia towers hide ageing IDE/SATA drives with tired motors and failing electronics.
A desktop makes access straightforward — the drive slides out and the recovery follows the same path as any hard drive or SSD job. All-in-ones, like touchscreen family PCs, behave more like laptops and can be sent whole. For workstations running two drives or motherboard RAID, let us know the setup when you get in touch so the drives are imaged and reassembled in the correct order.
It's a surprisingly common story: a shop or a well-meaning relative reinstalls Windows to fix a glitch, and the Documents folder disappears with it. The old files are usually still on the disk beneath the new installation — and the sooner the machine stops being used, the more we can carve back out.
Whatever a tower holds, it meets the complete hard drive and SSD stack — with the legacy shelf on standby for the older ones:
However old the drive or whatever it plugs into, the bench reaches its firmware directly.
A shaky desktop drive is captured one sector at a time with retries controlled in hardware, not software.
A clicking desktop drive gets donor heads fitted under filtered air, matched from stocked parts.
IDE/PATA, SCSI and first-generation SATA all connect natively — two decades of retired family PCs stay readable.
Your drive is duplicated in full on hardware imagers before recovery starts, so all the work runs on the copy and the original is spared.
Read-only imaging comes before analysis on every job, without exception.
From office fleets and gaming builds to the family tower that's held everything since 2011 — and the all-in-ones that are really laptops standing behind a monitor. Seagate Barracuda and WD Blue desktop drives are the usual casualties, failing heads after years of duty or losing their PCB to a surge; while older Fujitsu Esprimo and Packard Bell iMedia towers hide tired IDE/SATA disks that seize or drop off the bus.
Packard Bell was the high-street PC of the 2000s, sold by the thousand through PC World and catalogue retailers, and iMedia towers are still emerging from studies and lofts across Surrey and well beyond. Two jobs dominate: a tower that no longer starts, and a factory restore or fresh Windows install run over the top of years of family photos. Both are routine — the drive comes out, a complete image is taken, and the older files are lifted from that image rather than from the ageing original.
HP's desktop lines run from Pavilion and Slimline home towers to the ProDesk and EliteDesk machines bought by offices in bulk, and Compaq Presarios from either side of the 2002 merger still arrive holding payroll records and early digital photo collections. A regular arrival is the machine stopped at boot by HP's SMART Hard Disk Error 301 message — firmware shorthand for a drive on its way out, and the cue to power off and keep it off. From current SATA drives back to Presario-era IDE disks, the drive itself is all we need posted, and the bench takes it from there.
Dell OptiPlex and Lenovo ThinkCentre towers fill Britain's offices, and drives from decommissioned examples reach us regularly, often holding the only copy of old accounts, correspondence or CAD archives. Their workstation cousins — Precision and ThinkStation — frequently pair drives through Intel's onboard RAID, so if yours is one of those, send every drive together and note which port each was cabled to. The compact OptiPlex Micro and ThinkCentre Tiny swap full-size drives for 2.5-inch or M.2 storage, and those recover just as readily once unplugged.
Before anything goes in the post, the drive has to come out of your computer — we work on the bare drive only. Not sure how? Ring us on 0800 689 0668, or any local PC repair shop will take it out for a small fee.
Open the tower, unplug the drive (two screws plus the SATA and power leads, usually) and post the drive by itself. Because drive removal isn't a service we provide, the case does need opening at your end — the upside being cheaper postage and a PC that never leaves the house.
Most customers post their media to us tracked and insured.
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 Guildford 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.