Devices · notebooks and towers
Nine times in ten it is the screen, the mainboard or the charging circuit that has gone, with the disk behind them untouched. Now and again the disk is the fault itself, and that is different work. Either way the disk is what we are after here in Reading: the look at it costs nothing, a single drive is £300 + VAT, and the figure is fixed in writing before any chargeable work begins.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
0800 6890668
| What you are seeing | What is likely wrong | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| SMART Hard Disk Error, Hard Disk 1 (HP 301) | SMART has already failed the disk, and the BIOS refuses to boot it | Take it seriously. Image the disk today |
| HP: Boot Device Not Found (3F0) | The BIOS can see nothing to boot | A loose connector, or a failed disk |
| Dell: Error Code 2000-0142 | ePSA has failed the disk, and heads are the usual reason | Do not run it through a second time |
| Dell: Error Code 2000-0146 | The disk's log has been collecting errors for a while | This started long before today |
| Lenovo 2100 — BIOS cannot detect HDD0 (Main HDD) | Nothing answers on that channel: the cable, or the disk | Image it before anybody starts pulling cables |
| A disk read error occurred — Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart | The boot sector will not read, and possibly a good deal more besides | Another restart changes nothing |
| Reboot and Select proper Boot Device | The BIOS has nothing to start from | Find the fault before anyone reinstalls |
A case number goes on your device the day it reaches us, and an engineer then finds the real fault — free, and before anything else happens. You are told plainly what will come back and what will not, with one fixed figure in writing beside it. Nothing chargeable starts until you have read that and said yes.
Whatever unclips is out on the day the parcel arrives, and the rest of the machine sits on a shelf until the work is finished. Soldered flash leaves nothing to unplug, so the job moves to the board, and the chips are read in place, one at a time.
A drive that has genuinely failed joins the ordinary HDD or SSD queue. If the machine is finished and the drive is sound, taking the image is the whole of the job.
Whole user profiles come back on fresh media — documents, desktop, mail stores — arranged in the folder structure they were found in, with the return postage on us. The invoice waits on your approval of the file listing, never the other way round.
You see the file list first, then decide. Nothing is invoiced until you have said yes, and on most jobs there is no fee at all if the data does not come back. What we pull off goes onto media bought in for your job, and the postage home is ours. The case stays open on the bench until you tell us the files open on your own machine.
What comes in from around here: encrypted work laptops from the Green Park offices and from Thames Valley Park in Earley, machines reissued and re-imaged during the telecoms shuffle at Newbury, and the accounts PC from a Tilehurst sole trader that doubles as the family computer. One pattern holds across the lot: when the maker's own diagnostic names the disk, the disk is usually the fault. After that it is ordinary drive work, of the kind the hard drive and SSD pages set out.
The laptop itself was finished; the disk inside was only clicking. Heads off a matching donor went in, the imaging pass was run slowly on purpose, and three days later the marks, the reports and five years of lesson plans were back in her hands.
If the drive lives in a caddy, or comes out from under one screw, send that on its own — lower postage, and a small parcel travels better than a whole laptop does. Two minutes with a screwdriver is all it takes, and any repair shop will oblige. Soldered flash is the exception, and so is not being sure: in either case the machine goes in the box as it stands.
Almost always. Screens, mainboards and charging circuits finish far more laptops than disks do, and taking a sound drive out of a laptop that will never start again is among the quickest jobs here, and among the cheapest.
Only where the key has gone. An encrypted volume is ordinary work here — several pass through in a normal week — provided the parcel arrives with either the password or the 48-digit recovery key inside it. Neither one, and the volume stays shut, exactly as designed. So dig yours out before anything is posted.
Often a great deal. An installation only writes over part of the disk; the rest is left as it stood. What eats the rest is everything done afterwards, so shut the machine down, leave it alone and stop using it.
You pay nothing for the look. What comes back is a list — the files that opened, the ones that did not, and one fixed figure to finish the job. Leave it switched off until you have that in writing.