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 free diagnostic page.
Every desktop computer job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twelve cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Failing drive or corrupted system files — the documents come off the drive regardless.
Mechanical failure in progress; power down and stop rebooting it.
Storms and cheap PSUs kill drive electronics; PCB repair and ROM transfer bring the data back.
The drive has dropped off the bus — electronics, firmware or connection failure.
The old files usually survive underneath; the sooner the machine stops being used, the more comes back.
Recycle-bin emptied or Shift-Delete — recoverable until overwritten.
Bad sectors stall the whole machine; imaging hardware reads around the damage.
Infected desktops recover via imaging and clean extraction — see our ransomware page.
Striped pairs double the failure surface; both drives image before any reassembly.
IDE and SCSI drives from retired machines — the adapters are already on 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.
Desktop jobs get the full hard drive and SSD stack, plus the legacy shelf:
Firmware-level access for the drive inside, whatever its age or interface.
Unstable desktop drives image sector by sector with hardware-level retry control.
Clicking desktop drives get head swaps from matched donors under filtered air.
IDE/PATA, SCSI and early SATA — twenty years of retired family PCs remain readable.
The drive you send is imaged in full on hardware imagers first, so recovery always runs on a copy and your original is never stressed.
Originals are imaged read-only before analysis, every time.
Office fleets, gaming rigs and the family tower that's quietly held everything since 2011 — plus the all-in-ones that hide a laptop's insides behind a desktop's screen. 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.
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.
Slide the drive out and send just the drive — it's typically two screws and a SATA and power cable inside the tower. We don't provide a drive-removal service, so the tower needs opening at your end; it keeps your postage cheap and your PC at home too.
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 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.