RG8, Horseshoe Park and Whitchurch-on-Thames · Pangbourne
Data recovery in Pangbourne. Two trains an hour to Paddington, and ten years of client files in a spare room.
Pangbourne is a village in West Berkshire where the Pang comes out of its valley to meet the Thames — west of Reading on the A329, or up the A340 from the M4 at Junction 12. Its station opened on 1 June 1840 with the Great Western Railway's line west from Reading, and two electric trains an hour run each way between Paddington and Didcot Parkway off-peak, which is why RG8 is full of consultants, architects, accountants and software contractors working from a spare room on a laptop nobody at head office has ever touched, with ten years of client files and the family photographs on the same disk. Around them sit the small firms of Horseshoe Park — Companies House lists 76 active companies registered there, in power electronics, IT, lighting, heating and building — Pangbourne College, the independent school, the farm and estate offices up the valley, and Whitchurch-on-Thames on the Oxfordshire side of the toll bridge, which shares the RG8 postcode and the Reading post town. Nothing is collected. The drive goes by tracked post to the intake lab, and the first look costs nothing.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
0800 6890668
Five jobs that come in from the spare rooms and small units of RG8.
Different fault? Begin at the triage →| What you are seeing | Why it lands on our bench | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| A spare-room laptop that stops at the start-up screen, with the client files on it | Ten years of a consultancy's work on a disk that no employer's backup ever reached | Leave it off and let nobody reinstall anything; send the laptop whole, or the drive alone |
| A workstation at Horseshoe Park whose NVMe drive has vanished from the BIOS | A board layout, a test-data set and a firmware tree, all on that one drive and nowhere else | Unclip the NVMe and send just that, in an anti-static bag; the tower stays in the unit |
| A recruiter's candidate database on the office PC, and this morning it refuses to open | Every CV, every placement and every invoice since the firm began, on that single disk | Stop restarting it; unscrew the disk and post the disk bare |
| A farm-office recorder out in the RG8 lanes that has stopped playing anything back | Gate and yard cameras write to one disk day and night, and an insurer wants a clip off it | Pull the plug, lift the disk out and send the disk on its own; £400 + VAT covers a recorder |
| A heating contractor's laptop that will not boot, with every job photograph on it | Installs, certificates and the photographs of every job, on that disk and nowhere else | Do not let a shop reinstall it; take the drive out and post the drive |
Four things that hold for the whole of RG8.
What Pangbourne asks before the parcel goes.
Do you cover Pangbourne, Whitchurch-on-Thames and the rest of RG8?
Yes: the village and Horseshoe Park, the farms up the Pang valley, and Whitchurch-on-Thames, which is in Oxfordshire but carries the RG8 postcode and the Reading post town all the same. Purley on Thames, between Pangbourne and Tilehurst, is covered too. Nothing is collected from any of them, so the price and the timing are identical whichever side of the Thames the parcel starts from. Post it tracked on a working day and it is normally opened the next morning.
The laptop is my employer's and I work from home. Is it still your sort of job?
Yes — from a commuter village, that is the usual job. The machine is booked to you under a case number, nothing is ever written to its disk, and it goes home in the state it arrived: a read-only image is taken first and all later work happens on that copy. What we will need is the encryption recovery key, because an issued laptop is almost always protected by BitLocker or FileVault. That key was stored when the machine was first set up, so ask for it before you post. One drive is £300 + VAT, and you see that figure in writing before we go further.
A drive in the home office has been wet. Is it worth sending?
Yes, and quickly. A hard disk that has been wet is a routine job on the bench provided nobody has powered it since — most of the harm is done when a damp platter is spun up under the heads, and the rest by leaving it to corrode. So do not plug it in to see, do not warm it, and do not open it. Bag it as it is, damp and all, write water-damaged on the shipping form, and post it the same day. If somebody has already tried it, send it anyway and say so. One drive is £300 + VAT, and if the files do not come back, on most jobs you owe nothing.
Is there anywhere in Pangbourne to hand a drive in?
No. There is no counter in the village and none in Reading. Everything is opened, imaged and worked at the intake lab, which takes hand-ins on weekdays at the address printed on the shipping form, and that is the one place a drive changes hands. From RG8 the sensible route is the post: tracked, insured, rigid box, and it is generally with an engineer the next working morning. Looking costs nothing and the return leg is ours.
If this sounds like yours, start here.
Next door to Pangbourne, on the same terms
Pack it in Pangbourne; the parcel makes the journey, not you.
Power it down and leave it down. Then describe what it was doing as it stopped — the noise, the light, the message on the screen. Looking is free, the figure is written down for you, and nothing is charged for until you have agreed that figure.