Devices · laptops & desktop machines
A dead computer rarely means a dead drive — boards, screens and power give up on their own schedule while the storage sits untouched. Pull-out disk or flash soldered to the board, Exeter desktop or student laptop, it's all one to us: what matters is the files.
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| What it says | What it usually means | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| HP: SMART Hard Disk Error — Hard Disk 1 (301) | The firmware saw SMART trouble and is refusing to boot from the disk | Believe it — get an image made |
| HP: Boot Device Not Found (3F0) | No bootable drive in sight | A dropped connection, or a dead disk |
| Dell: Error Code 2000-0142 | Dell's self-test failed — heads, as a rule | Stop repeating the test |
| Dell: Error Code 2000-0146 | The drive's internal log already holds a history of errors | It's been failing for a while |
| Lenovo: 2100 — Detection error on HDD0 (Main HDD) | The drive isn't seen: loose cable, or the disk itself gone | Get the image before you touch any cable |
| A disk read error occurred — press Ctrl+Alt+Del | A boot sector destroyed, or a system disk it can't read | Another restart won't fix this |
| Reboot and Select proper Boot Device | The BIOS can't find any disk worth booting | Diagnose it — no reinstalling |
Your device is logged under its own case number the day it arrives. An engineer finds the fault, tells you plainly what stands a real chance of coming back, and writes you one fixed quote. Nothing is charged for that look, nothing obliges you, and paid work starts only when you say so.
If the drive unclips, it comes out and the laptop goes to one side. If the storage is soldered down, the board itself stays with us and we read the flash where it sits.
A failed drive follows the standard HDD or SSD route. A healthy one out of a broken laptop just needs imaging — often our fastest job.
Checked against a listing you approve first, your folders come back on new media, laid out as you know them — profiles, desktop, documents and email stores.
Before any fee falls due you see a full listing of everything recovered and approve it. Your files travel back on brand-new media, return postage on us, and the case stays open until you've confirmed everything opens on your own machine.
A pattern from the intake bench: when the built-in diagnostic points at storage, the drive genuinely has gone in the great majority of cases — a loose lead is the exception. Beyond that, laptop disks fail no differently from the HDD and SSD cases described further up.
Repairing the laptop made no sense, and its drive had started to click. New heads from a donor and a careful image followed; by the third day, her lesson plans, coursework marks and reports — five years of them — were back.
If the drive comes out easily, post just the drive — it's safer and cheaper to send, and any local repair shop will have it out in minutes. Where the storage is soldered to the board, or you're not sure, send the whole machine and we'll sort it.
Good odds indeed. Screens, motherboards and power faults kill far more laptops than failed drives do. Lifting a healthy drive out of a dead machine is about the surest job on our bench.
No, as long as you can produce the password or recovery key — BitLocker work is routine here. With no key, the encryption does exactly what it promises and shuts everyone out; check your Microsoft account for it.
Partly, in most cases — a reinstall writes over some areas and misses others. Stop using the machine straight away — the more it's used, the less survives. Make that your first job.
Each power-up of a failing device takes more data with it. Open a case first — the look-over is free whichever way it goes.