Database corruption breaks the usual rules of this trade: the drive is often perfectly healthy, and the damage lives inside the files — a SQL Server database marked suspect, an Exchange store that dismounted and won’t return, MySQL tables that crash the engine on contact. The recoveries are won or lost on one discipline: every repair happens on a copy, because the built-in tools that promise to fix these files are also licensed to amputate.
A database is a fussy tenant. Kill the power mid-transaction and its pages tear; let a single bad sector land inside an index and whole tables go unreachable; run out of disk during a log replay and Exchange declares the store dirty and sulks. Sometimes the underlying drive really is dying too — in which case the drive is imaged first like any patient — but just as often the hardware is blameless and the corruption is purely structural.
Either way the working material is the same: an exact copy of the MDF and LDF, the EDB and its logs, or the InnoDB and MyISAM files, taken before any tool with a repair button gets near them.
Microsoft named it honestly and people run it anyway. SQL Server’s last-resort repair does exactly what it says: it makes the database consistent by deleting whatever it can’t reconcile — rows, pages, entire tables — and it does so irreversibly, on the original. Exchange’s hard repair, eseutil /p, carries the same character. Run on the only copy, these commands convert a recoverable corruption into a permanent absence.
Our version of the same operation is run against a copy, page by page, salvaging the records the blunt tools discard — and if a table is genuinely beyond saving, you find out with the original still intact.
The deliverable isn’t a folder of files; it’s a database that mounts. SQL Server sets restored to a consistent, attachable state with the salvage documented table by table. Exchange stores brought back to clean shutdown, or mailboxes extracted individually when the store itself is past reason. MySQL and the smaller engines — Access, SQLite, the line-of-business formats — rebuilt to the point your application opens them. Where the loss was real, you get a precise account of it rather than a shrug.
Because no two of these jobs are the same shape or size, the price is quoted to the job — individually, in writing, after the free assessment and before any paid work begins. Every job starts with a free diagnostic and ends the same way it was quoted: the figure goes in writing before a single sector is read, and on most jobs there is nothing to pay unless your data comes back. No hourly meter, no surprise “evaluation fee”, no percentage of what the files are worth.
Take it offline and copy the MDF and LDF files somewhere safe — that’s the whole first move. Don’t detach-and-reattach repeatedly, and don’t run repair commands on the originals. With clean copies secured, diagnosis is free and the repair happens where mistakes can’t compound.
It raises the stakes, not the ceiling — the recovery works from the damaged files themselves, so a missing backup mostly means there’s no shortcut to fall back on. Page-level salvage typically recovers the overwhelming majority of rows even from badly torn databases. The free assessment will tell you the realistic percentage before you commit.
Almost always. A dirty shutdown leaves the EDB waiting for log replay that can no longer complete; we bring the store to a clean state from copies, or lift the mailboxes out individually when the container is too far gone. Resist running eseutil /p on the original — that’s the one move that closes doors.
Yes — that’s two of our jobs stacked: the drive is imaged first as a hardware patient, then the database files are repaired from the image. It’s common on servers, where the disk fault is what tore the pages in the first place. One assessment covers both layers.
Two honest routes, no vans. Hand the device in at Tay House, 300 Bath Street — right at Charing Cross, two minutes off the M8 — Monday to Friday, 9am–5:30pm. Or wrap it well and send it by insured, tracked post from Paisley, Ayrshire, the Highlands or anywhere else in the UK. Either way the work is done in-house by our own engineers, with a documented chain of custody, and your data never leaves the UK.
Secure copies of the database files, stop every repair attempt, and let the free assessment map what’s salvageable — database recovery is priced from £500 + VAT, fixed in writing first. Database recovery for Glasgow firms — SQL Server, Exchange, MySQL and the rest, mended at page level and returned mounting.