Crowthorne is a village that grew up around two institutions and a pine forest. Wellington College came first in 1859, Broadmoor followed four years later, and for most of a century the hospital siren was tested across the rooftops every Monday morning until it was finally retired. The village has always been quietly used to specialist work happening behind the trees.
Media sent in from Crowthorne is diagnosed free. One written figure lands before any work starts: £300 + VAT a single drive or SSD, £250 + VAT a card or stick, arrays from £500 + VAT.
RG45 is small and the work that comes from it is disproportionately technical. The old transport research site on Old Wokingham Road shaped the professional character of the place for decades, and the engineers, consultants and small research firms who settled here because of it are still working, often now from home offices at the end of the garden. What arrives on the bench is measurement data: long instrument runs, logged test series, model outputs, the kind of file set that took months of physical work to produce and cannot simply be generated again next week.
Those datasets fail in a way that catches people out. They usually live on one large external drive, because they are too big for a laptop and too awkward for the cloud, and that drive gets carried between an office, a house and a site vehicle. Portable drives are dropped, and a drop is head damage rather than a file problem. The tell is a change of sound, a faint tick or a repeated cycle of spinning up and stopping. At the first sign of it, pull the power and stop, because every additional minute a damaged drive spends spinning takes surface away.
The village also sends what any village sends. Wellington College and Edgbarrow between them mean a steady flow of student and teaching laptops, especially in the spring. Small trades working out of Pinewood and Ravenswood, shops and practices along the High Street and Duke's Ride, and households across Owlsmoor and the Sandhurst side of the boundary post in externals holding photographs, accounts and everything else that ended up on one disc because there was only ever one disc.
There is no shop in Crowthorne and nothing is collected. Media travels on its own: the bare drive out of the machine, wrapped so it cannot shift, tracked and insured to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH, which arrives the next working day from RG45. If you would rather book a courier yourself, do that and pay them direct. Mobile phones and tablets are not accepted, and storage soldered onto a mainboard cannot be worked on at all.
The diagnostic costs nothing, closes 2 working days after the parcel lands, and ends with the fault named in plain words and one fixed written figure. Any one hard drive or SSD, NVMe included, is £300 + VAT. Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT. NAS boxes, RAID sets and servers start at £500 + VAT and go up with the disc count. CCTV and DVR work is £400 + VAT, BitLocker £400 + VAT, and forensic work with a written report £800 + VAT. No fix, no fee applies to logical faults only. Mechanical, electronic, board-level and chip-level jobs, and water or fire damage, take half the quote before the work and the balance only if the data returns. Freephone 0800 689 0668, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm.
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.
Nothing to pay for the diagnosis, £300 + VAT for a single drive or SSD, and £250 + VAT for a card or stick.