Film has been made on Ealing Green since 1902, which makes the studios there the oldest still working anywhere, and the trade never really left the postcode. W5 and W13 are full of editors, producers, colourists and sound people working from converted lofts, and the files they work on are large enough that a single failed disk takes a whole project with it.
Media sent in from Ealing 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.
A great many people in this part of London search for hard disk repair when what they need is data recovery, and the two are genuinely different trades. Repair means making the machine work again: a new drive, a fresh install, the computer handed back running. That is exactly right when the fault is a screen, a battery or a power supply. When the failed part is the disk itself, a repair approach fixes the box and loses the contents, and reinstalling an operating system over the top pushes what was there further out of reach. If the files matter more than the hardware, stop before anything is swapped, cloned or reformatted, and ring first.
A failed disk is also rarely repaired in the sense people imagine. Nothing is soldered back together and handed over working for another five years. What happens is that the disk is stabilised long enough to be read, often with donor parts matched to it, an image is taken, and the files are rebuilt from that image and returned on fresh media. The original is then returned or destroyed as you instruct. That distinction is why the quote covers the data rather than the device, and why any drive or SSD is priced at £300 + VAT regardless of its capacity or how it failed.
The post-production trade brings its own patterns. Edit projects live on fast external volumes or small striped arrays for speed, which means no redundancy at all by design, and a single disk taking one of those out removes everything. Media caches, project files and render outputs are usually scattered across several volumes, so it is worth saying which project and which drive matters when you ring. Beyond the studios, W5 and W13 send the ordinary run: practices and agencies around the Broadway, shops with tills and recorders, schools, and household drives from Northfields, Hanwell, West Ealing and the roads around Walpole Park.
There is no unit in Ealing and no London address, so media is posted. Take the disk out of the machine or its enclosure, pack it so it cannot move inside the box, and send it tracked and insured to Guildford Data Recovery, Building 2, Ground Floor, Guildford Business Park, Guildford GU2 8XH. A parcel from W5 is on the bench the next working day, which beats carrying a drive across town to a counter that will only post it onward. Nothing is collected from any London address; a courier you book and pay for yourself is welcome.
The diagnostic is free, closes 2 working days after the parcel arrives, and produces one fixed written figure with an honest view of what will come back. Any single hard disk or SSD, NVMe included, is £300 + VAT. Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT. Striped or mirrored sets, NAS boxes and servers start at £500 + VAT and rise with the disc count. CCTV and DVR work is £400 + VAT, BitLocker £400 + VAT, forensic investigation with a written report £800 + VAT. No fix, no fee applies to logical faults. Mechanical, electronic, board-level and chip-level repair, and water or fire damage, take 50% of the quote before the work with the balance only on success. 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.