CV31 to CV33, Silicon Spa · Leamington Spa
Leamington Spa data recovery. A Silicon Spa build is source, art and version history on one disk.
Royal Leamington Spa took its 'Royal' prefix from Queen Victoria in 1838, and had grown from the village of Leamington Priors after its spa waters were rediscovered in 1784 into the Regency town of the Parade and the Pump Rooms. Its working signature now is Silicon Spa: more than a thousand people develop games here, at studios such as Playground Games and SEGA HARDlight. For them a failed drive is rarely a document — it is a whole project. Source code, level and character art, motion-capture and audio, the build artefacts and the local version history sit on a developer's workstation, an external scratch disk or an NVMe, and that history is the work. Around the studios the Regency town runs on offices — solicitors, accountants, agencies and design practices keeping client work on a single server or NAS — and much of the Gaydon engineering workforce lives here too. The failure is the same for all of them. Power it down, pack it so nothing moves, and post it tracked to the Manchester lab; the first look is free.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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What fails around Leamington Spa.
No match here? Run the triage →| What you see | Why we see it here | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A studio PC that drops its build drive mid-milestone | Source, level art and the local Perforce depot are all on that one disk | Stop the rebuilds, power it down, send it as found |
| A shared project RAID that has thrown two disks | A whole team's art and daily builds live on the array, copied nowhere else | Post the whole box, or the loose disks with each one bay-tagged; run no resync first |
| An artist's external SSD the Mac has stopped seeing | Texture packs and motion-capture takes get parked on it and forgotten | Leave it unplugged; flash recovery is bench work |
| A home-office NAS in a CV32 study that will not mount | Studio staff work partly from home, and the one backup is that box | Shut it down and send the whole box, drives left inside |
| A Regency-office server a firm cannot open on Monday | Matter files, ledgers and years of email on one box, kept to retention rules | Leave it powered down, note the model, and send the drive |
Leamington Spa, the practical side.
What Leamington Spa asks us.
Is Leamington Spa covered — the Silicon Spa studios and the CV31 to CV33 streets?
Yes — the whole town, the games studios and the Regency streets off the Parade included. It does not turn on where you sit: media travels by tracked post to Manchester, so a CV32 drive is on the bench as fast as one sent next door, and a weekday parcel is usually read the morning after. We pay the leg home.
A studio machine has died with the day's work on it. Can that come back?
Usually. A game's source, its art and the local version history live on the same everyday disks as any office file, and they go the same everyday ways — a worn NVMe, a knocked scratch drive, a corrupt volume. Tell us which project matters most and that is worked first. Post the drive as it is; do not keep powering it up hoping the build mounts.
It is a shared project array — should I take the disks out first?
Leave it assembled and send the whole unit if you can. If it must come apart, pull the bare disks and label each with its bay number so the set can be rebuilt in the right order here. Do not run a repair or resync to fix it yourself — that is what turns a recoverable array into a hard case.
Can I drop a drive in somewhere in Leamington?
There is no counter in the town — no one on the Parade to take it in. A drive comes to us one of two ways: posted under tracked, insured cover, or delivered by hand to the Manchester lab on a weekday. Either way the diagnosis is free and the run back to Leamington is on us.
Other pages worth a look here.
Post it from Leamington Spa; we open it the day it lands.
Keep it powered down and tell us how it happened. Nothing is agreed until the free diagnosis lands.