When a computer fails, the screen is the witness statement. A completely black screen, a logo that loops forever, a blue screen with a sad face, a machine that’s alive but grinding — each points at a different culprit, and only some of them are the drive at all. The good news hiding in all four: the data almost always outlives the computer.
Nothing at all points at power or the motherboard — the drive is usually a bystander, removed and read directly. A logo loop means the machine finds the drive but Windows or macOS can’t finish waking: often corruption, sometimes a drive failing right at the sectors the operating system lives on. A blue screen is the OS catching a fault mid-flight — drive health is the first thing we test. Alive but grinding or freezing is the drive telling you directly, and it deserves an immediate shutdown.
The triage matters because the wrong assumption drives the wrong fix — and the classic wrong fix is the one below.
Somewhere between the boot loop and the panic, somebody always suggests reinstalling Windows. It works, in the sense that the machine boots again — and it overwrites the exact regions of the drive where your documents, desktop and photo folders lived. Reinstall-then-regret is one of the most common jobs we see from Glasgow’s computer shops, and it turns clean recoveries into partial ones.
If the files matter more than the machine, recover first and reinstall second. It is genuinely that simple, and nobody says it loudly enough.
Liquid takes the keyboard and board first; the drive usually survives if the machine is powered off fast and never “tested” while damp. Drops depend on whether a spinning drive was spinning — SSDs shrug at falls; hard drives do not. And the newest complication: thin laptops with storage soldered straight to the motherboard, where the recovery is board-level work on the machine itself. One practical rule before anything travels: we work on the drive, not the chassis. Take the drive out — or let any local computer shop pop it out in minutes — and send the drive itself.
If the machine stops at “no bootable device found”, the guide on what that message actually means shows you how to tell a boot-order setting from a dead disk in sixty seconds — before any repair tool writes to it.
A single drive — internal, external, laptop or desktop — is a fixed £300 + VAT, whatever the fault turns out to be. Chip-level exceptions are rare and always quoted in writing first. 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.
Almost certainly — a machine that won’t power is usually a dead board or charger circuit, not dead storage. The drive comes out and is imaged directly; on soldered-storage models we work at board level to reach the chips. A dead laptop with living data is the most common job in this trade.
Power off hard — hold the button, unplug, remove the battery if it’s removable — and do not turn it on to check. Liquid plus electricity is what kills boards; time without power is what saves them. Get it to us damp rather than “dried and tested”; we’ll take it from there.
Not everything — a reinstall overwrites some regions and spares others, so the honest answer is “partial, and we’ll tell you which part”. Stop using the machine immediately: every boot writes more. The free assessment maps exactly what survived before you commit to anything.
Yes — towers, all-in-ones, minis and home-builds, with any mix of NVMe, SATA SSDs and hard drives inside. Send the drives themselves, labelled if there’s more than one; if you’re not sure which holds what, a local shop can pull the set in one visit — label them by bay and post the lot.
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.
And the golden shipping rule: the drive travels, the computer stays home. Remove it — or have any local shop do it in minutes — label it if there’s more than one, and send the drives themselves.
Stop the restart cycle, skip the reinstall, and let the free diagnostic name the real culprit. Laptop data recovery in Glasgow — over the counter at Tay House or by insured post, machine or bare drive alike.