Specialist · Acer laptops
Acer builds to a price, and what sits inside varies more than the badge on the lid suggests. Most of what reaches us from Birmingham falls into four sorts: an Aspire that stops at a black screen with a healthy drive behind it, a Nitro whose NVMe card has dropped out of the BIOS, a Swift with its storage soldered to the mainboard, and a TravelMate locked by BitLocker its owner never knowingly turned on. We settle which before quoting.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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| What you see | What is behind it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| An Aspire stuck at a black screen | The board, the screen cable or the charging circuit — the drive behind it is untouched | Do not reinstall Windows over it |
| A Nitro with no drive listed in BIOS | The controller on the M.2 card has failed, so the machine boots looking for a disk | Send that card alone, in a static bag |
| A Swift with nothing inside to unscrew | Storage soldered on as eMMC, so the mainboard is effectively the drive | Send the laptop whole, charger included |
| A cracked hinge on a laptop that was dropped | Shock damage: a knocked disk, or a cracked M.2 card | Leave it off, and let an engineer look at it first |
| A blue screen asking for a BitLocker key | Windows 11 encrypted the drive and put the key in a Microsoft account | Fetch the key from that account first |
| A TravelMate stuck in automatic repair | The file system is damaged, not the files sitting under it | Power it off and stop the loop |
Every item gets a case number of its own the day it lands. An engineer then works out what has actually failed and tells you plainly which files have a real chance of coming back and which do not. Only then does a price follow: one figure, fixed, in writing, and it costs you nothing to see it. Nothing is charged until you say yes.
A dead Acer is not switched on over and over in the hope that it changes its mind. The drive comes out at the bench and goes onto a port of our own, which answers the first question in minutes: the machine, or the storage?
Spinning disks are opened under clean air with donors matched for family and batch. Where the storage is soldered there is nothing to unplug, so it is read from the board itself, and a BitLocker volume waits on its key before anything legible comes off.
A failing NVMe card is read in short runs with cooling between them, the awkward regions left until the rest is safely down. A knocked 2.5in disk gets the same treatment. Days of it, on occasion, rather than hours.
No invoice is raised until the full list of recovered files has sat in front of you and you have said go ahead. Your data comes back on media we buy new, posted at our expense, and the job is not closed here until every file has opened on your own machine.
The point where we stop: BitLocker is real encryption. Without the recovery key from the account that machine was tied to, the drive stays shut and no laboratory alters that. Soldered eMMC has its own hard edge: if the controller inside the chip has died, there is nothing left to read the cells with. You see the file list before anything becomes payable.
It had gone off a desk lid-first and would not power on at all, and like most of them it came to us boxed and complete. Two M.2 cards sat inside: a SATA drive holding the photo library, and an NVMe boot drive whose controller had given up. Both were imaged separately, the NVMe in short runs across two days. Nearly everything came off, a decade of family pictures included.
Usually not. On the machines that come to us, the fault is far more often the mainboard, the charging circuit or the screen than the storage behind them, and from the outside the two look identical. The drive comes out at the bench and is read on equipment of our own, where it either answers or it does not, and that settles it in minutes rather than days. If it reads, the job turns into a copy rather than a recovery, and the free diagnosis tells you which of the two you have before any price is put to you.
The drive on its own, in nearly every case. Most Acer jobs still arrive as a complete laptop, which costs more to send, turns up knocked about more often and gives the bench nothing extra. Take out the 2.5in disk or the M.2 card, note which slot it came from, and send that. The exceptions are real, though: on the thin Aspire and Swift models the storage is soldered to the mainboard, and then the whole machine has to travel, because the board is the drive.
Windows 11 turns device encryption on by itself on plenty of machines, so the first most owners hear of BitLocker is a blue screen asking for 48 digits. The key is almost always sitting in the Microsoft account the laptop was signed into, or with whoever set the machine up at work. Go and find it before you post anything. We can image a locked drive and hold it, but without that key the contents stay unreadable, and no laboratory gets around that.
Then the storage is soldered on, which is normal on the slimmer Aspire and Swift models. There is no card to pull out; the memory sits on the mainboard as eMMC, and the data has to be read from the board itself. Send the laptop complete, charger included, and say what it was doing before it stopped. If liquid got into it, leave it off and let us look while the tracks hold.
Every extra power-up takes something off a drive that is already going. Leave it switched off and let the free diagnosis say what still reads.