Devices · laptops and desktops
Two different problems get described in the same words. A laptop that will not start is usually a screen, a board or a charging circuit giving out, with the storage behind it perfectly well; a disk that has genuinely failed is another matter altogether. Either way, the drive is what we go after, wherever in Birmingham the machine started out.
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| What you see | What is behind it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| HP: Hard Disk 1 (301) — SMART Hard Disk Error | The BIOS will not boot a disk that its own SMART data has condemned | Take it as final. Image it now |
| HP: Boot Device Not Found (3F0) | Nothing bootable can be found | A loose connector, or a drive that has died |
| Dell: Error Code 2000-0142 | ePSA has failed the drive — the head assembly, usually | Do not run it again |
| Dell: Error Code 2000-0146 | Errors have been stacking up in the drive's log for a while | This did not start today |
| Lenovo BIOS: 2100 — Detection error on HDD0 (Main HDD) | Nothing replies on that port — either a cable, or a dead disk | Image it first, then look at the cabling |
| A disk read error occurred — Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart | The boot sector is unreadable, or the whole disk is | Restarting solves nothing |
| Reboot and Select proper Boot Device | The BIOS finds nothing to boot from | Diagnose it before any reinstall |
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 drive that unclips comes out, and the shell of the machine waits on a shelf. Where the flash is soldered down there is nothing to unplug: the mainboard is now the job, and the chips get read where they sit.
A drive that has genuinely failed goes into the ordinary HDD or SSD queue. A healthy one trapped inside a dead machine wants an image and nothing more.
Profiles, desktops, documents and mail files come back in the folders they were in, on media we buy new, and you sign off the list before any invoice exists.
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.
What comes in from Birmingham and the West Midlands says the same: once a maker's own diagnostic names the storage, the storage has usually gone, and the loose cable everyone hopes for is the exception. From there it is an ordinary disk job, run exactly as our hard drive and SSD pages describe.
By the time it reached us the disk was clicking and the laptop itself was scrap. We fitted donor heads, imaged at a crawl, and inside three days she had every lesson plan, report and set of marks from five years of teaching.
If the drive lifts out on a caddy or a single screw, that is all we need: it costs less to post, and a small parcel comes through the journey better than a boxed laptop. Any repair shop will pull one out for you in a minute or two. Where the storage is soldered down, or you cannot tell which it is, send the lot.
Usually, yes. What finishes a laptop off is far more often the screen, the mainboard or the charging circuit than anything inside the drive, and lifting a healthy disk out of a machine that has died is about the least risky job on this bench.
Not if the recovery key or the password travels with it — locked volumes reach this bench every week and are ordinary work. Without that key the volume stays shut, which is precisely what Microsoft built it to do, so go and find yours before you post anything.
Often a fair amount. A fresh install lands on parts of the disk and leaves the rest alone, but every hour of use afterwards eats into what survives, so stop working on the machine and set it aside.
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.