Home towers, office workstations and all-in-one PCs — when a desktop stops booting or a drive inside fails, we recover the data. Remove the drive and send it in from anywhere in Sheffield.
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 ten 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 guide.
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.
A desktop makes access easy — 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) are more like laptops and can be sent whole. For workstations running two drives or motherboard RAID, tell us the setup when you get in touch so the drives are imaged and reassembled in the right order.
A surprisingly common one: a shop or a well-meaning relative reinstalls Windows to fix a problem, and the documents folder goes with it. The old files are often still on the disk underneath the new installation — 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.
Packard Bell's iMedia towers sold in huge numbers to UK homes, and their drives now reach us two ways: still inside a machine that finally refused to start, or bare — pulled from a tower scrapped years ago and kept in a drawer 'just in case'. The classic self-inflicted loss is a factory restore run to speed a slow machine up, burying years of photos under a fresh copy of Windows; the older files generally survive beneath it and are lifted from a full sector image of the disk. Ageing IDE and early-SATA mechanics get the legacy adapters and the gentle, patient imaging their years demand.
Pavilion towers from home studies and EliteDesk and OptiPlex machines from office fleets supply a steady stream of drives to this bench. Decommissioned office stock has a pattern of its own: OptiPlex drives shelved during a clear-out and rediscovered when the old accounts or drawings on them are suddenly needed, the drives themselves now reluctant to spin after years of standing still. Home machines more often arrive after a storm surge takes out the PSU and drive electronics together, or when Windows sticks at its logo over a disk full of bad sectors. In every case the drive alone is all we need posted — imaged first, repaired where necessary, data handed back on new media.
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 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 Leeds 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.