Three questions, each answered by clicking a button: the class of hardware, the badge on it, and the behaviour that brought you here. What comes back is the fault that combination usually turns out to be, the single most useful thing to do next, and an honest span for how long repairs of that type run. Nothing personal is asked for until the last step, and even then only so an engineer can confirm the reading by telephone.
Diagnosis is not a chargeable service here. Neither the version on this page nor the proper examination at Guildford. An invoice only comes into existence after you have read a fixed figure and said yes to it.
Nothing about reaching a price costs you anything; the number is set once an engineer has had the media in front of him. Logical faults — a deleted folder, a formatted volume, indexing that has come apart — keep the no fix, no fee footing, so nothing recovered means nothing billed. Where damage turns out to be electronic, mechanical or in the media itself, donor parts and clean-bench time get spent before a sector can be read at all, which is why half the figure is settled first. Chip-level, DVR and forensic instructions are paid before they begin. Whichever footing applies is on the written quote before a screw turns.
Address it to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH. Written questions land with the bench at support@guildforddatarecovery.co.uk. The two PDFs: ↓ booking-in sheet · ↓ terms and conditions
Four boxes, and somebody rings back with a considered opinion instead of a pitch. Nothing about it obliges you to anything.
An engineer reads it himself and comes back to you shortly. If you have already decided to post the media, address it to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH.
Would rather say it out loud than click it? 0800 689 0668 is open Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm, and support@guildforddatarecovery.co.uk lands with the same engineers. Your own description of the fault is worth every bit as much as these buttons.
The band is set by the class of media and by the nature of the fault inside it. It is never set by how badly you want the files back. Three of the five published bands account for nearly everything that comes through the door, and your own figure goes in writing once an engineer has had the hardware in front of him.
Pen drives, plus SD, microSD and CompactFlash cards of every capacity.
Any one disk, platter or flash, whatever it was pulled out of. NVMe blades included.
Multi-disk kit — arrays, NAS boxes, servers, SANs — counted a member at a time.
Two narrower bands finish the list. £400 + VAT is one figure doing three jobs — a recorder disk out of a CCTV or DVR unit, a BitLocker or otherwise encrypted volume, and a forensic binary image with the deleted files extracted where no written report is wanted. Forensic casework that does end in a full written report is £800 + VAT, paid before it starts, with genuinely large or multi-device matters scoped and quoted on their own. Five figures in total, one of which serves three kinds of job rather than becoming three bands. Ransomware is not one of them: it takes the hardware bands like anything else, £300 + VAT for one encrypted drive and from £500 + VAT for a server, NAS or array. Risk splits along the line between logical and physical. No fix, no fee applies to logical recoveries — deletions, formats, broken file systems, healthy hardware the machine will not admit exists. The published exclusions are electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs, all of which want a donor board, a head and motor transplant, chips lifted off a card, or work at firmware and service-area level. Money goes out on those before a sector is ever read, which is why physical work is 50% upfront. A handful of jobs outrun every band on this page — a board burnt beyond reading, media snapped in two, a set that fills a whole shelf — and those are quoted individually, in writing, with nothing starting until you have seen the number.
The bench examination is engineering, not five minutes with a downloaded scanner. The order is fixed, because what each stage finds decides whether the stage after it can safely be attempted, and the whole of it closes 2 working days from arrival rather than sooner.
Nothing happens before power is understood. Supply rails, bridge and controller board get tested, and the drive's own ROM is lifted and stored somewhere safe.
Head stack, bearings and platter surfaces are judged with the drive stationary. No difficult read is attempted until that judgement exists.
Service area and translator go under the PC-3000. Damage at that depth is entirely invisible to any tool running on an ordinary computer.
A measured imaging pass shows how much of the platters or the NAND will actually give data up, and marks where the weak regions are.
Structures get mapped, so what you receive is a list rather than a percentage: folders intact, folders damaged, folders beyond help.
One price, matched to the fault that was found rather than the one that was feared. Yes and it starts; no and the media goes home. Neither costs you anything.
There are not many ways for storage to fail, and each of them tends to announce itself the same way every time. A tick on repeat is a head stack hunting for a position it cannot find. A beep roughly once a second is a spindle motor trying to start and giving up. A device that shows in the list at a capacity it never had has a controller in difficulty. An offer to format a volume points at broken indexing on hardware that is perfectly sound. None of that is fortune-telling; it is pattern matching against a long queue of jobs that came before yours.
So the wizard takes your three answers, looks up what that combination usually turns out to mean, and hands back the likely cause, what it implies for the odds, and the one action most likely to protect them. It is not an examination and does not claim to be. It has no way of seeing a scored platter, a collapsed translator or a few thousand sectors that have quietly stopped answering, and any tool claiming to know those things from three clicks is selling you something.
It is also blunt in the places where bluntness helps. Urgent symptoms get told to stop using the device now, with the reason attached. Faults that fall outside what this lab handles — soldered flash first among them, phones and tablets after — are named on the screen rather than after you have paid for postage.
Unplug it. Dull advice, and the most useful thing on this page. A mechanism that has begun to fail chews at itself a little more on every rotation it is asked to make. A deleted file lives exactly as long as it takes for something else to be written into its space. A struggling SSD keeps shuffling its own translation tables in the background for as long as it has power. Cut the power and all three clocks stop at once, and none of them restarts while the device sits in a padded box waiting for the postman.
Nearly every job here arrived as a parcel. Tracked, insured post is the calmest way to move a drive that is already struggling, and something handed over in Berkshire, Surrey or London is normally on the Guildford bench the next working day.
Is the storage still bolted into a machine — laptop, tower, iMac, MacBook, rack server, a DVR under the till? Free it first and send the bare unit. Stripping hardware is not something this lab does, though it is ten minutes' work for any repair shop on your high street. There is a single case with no way round it: memory chips soldered flat onto the mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon machines and certain ultrabooks are built. Where the storage cannot be unbolted, there is no parcel to make up.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
The name on the parcel wants to be Guildford Data Recovery. Driving it over from Bracknell is roughly forty minutes on the A322 then the A3; posting it costs you a stamp and a day. Either way, a message goes out to you as soon as it is logged onto the system, and two working days later the diagnostic is finished.
Unsure whether something should go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 while the lid is still open, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it tell you.
Pack the bare media well, put your name and a contact number in the box with it, and buy a tracked, insured service.