The laptop had quit booting after a Windows update went wrong, with months of coursework on its one internal drive and no copy anywhere.
A student’s Acer Aspire had stopped booting after a Windows update stalled midway, and months of coursework — a nearly-finished dissertation among it — lived on the single drive inside, with nothing copied elsewhere. By the time it reached us the drive had started to click.
We opened it in the clean-air environment and found a failed head in the stack. Laptop drives make this kind of work fiddlier than a desktop: the 2.5-inch format packs the heads close together with very fine tolerances, so there’s little margin for error and every movement has to be deliberate.
A matched donor head set went in, selected to suit that drive so the replacements tracked the platters properly, and imaging ran on the DeepSpar. We took it one head at a time, banking each good surface completely before turning to the weakest, while the imager kept power and timeouts reined in so a delicate drive was never overworked; the PC3000 dealt with the firmware side. On a head-damaged drive that order is everything — get the straightforward data safely off first, then spend what little life the drive has left on the awkward regions.
We rebuilt the file system from the copy and opened the dissertation, its bibliography and the surrounding files to be sure they were whole, then wrote everything to fresh media.
The coursework came back in full, the dissertation included, six working days later — with time to spare before the hand-in. A painless way to learn a hard rule: anything you’re working towards should live in at least two places, because a lone laptop drive tends to fail in the week it matters most.
DeepSpar DDI · PC3000 — heads replaced and the drive imaged and rebuilt on our bench. A copy is taken first and the original is never written to.
Send us your device for a free diagnostic, and tell us a little about what happened — an engineer will review it and confirm your exact quote in writing before any work begins.
Getting your data back begins with getting the device to us. Pack it up safely, pop your contact details inside, and send it over — once we’ve run the free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work starts.
Posting it? A tracked, insured service is what we’d recommend. Rather drop it in? You’re welcome Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm — just package the device up as above first.
Want a bit more detail first? Fill in the form with more about your issue and an engineer will review it and send you a custom quote.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 01483 901310.
Usually. A laptop that won’t start is often a mainboard fault over a perfectly good drive, in which case we lift the drive and image it; if the drive itself has failed — clicking, for instance — we recover it in the clean-air environment first.
From £300 plus VAT, most jobs no fix, no fee, with a fixed written quote agreed before any work.
Usually just the drive — a local shop can remove it in minutes. If it’s soldered to the mainboard, or you’d rather not open the laptop, send the whole thing and we’ll handle removal and testing.
Start with an instant online quote, or call and talk it through with us first. You'll have a clear, fixed price before any work begins.