The Iron Burgh once fed furnaces around the clock; today its data mostly sits on drives that were never meant to work that hard for that long. When one finally gives, the run west is short and the diagnosis is free.
Coatbridge joins the M8 at junction 8 via the A89, and Charing Cross is twenty to twenty-five minutes on. The town’s stations — Sunnyside and Central among them — run direct services into Glasgow all day. And the padded insured parcel remains the option that asks nothing of your diary: posted today, benched tomorrow.
Monklands casework is honest and mixed: work machines from the units along the corridor, family laptops carrying everything since the last house move, match-day and holiday photos on cards, and the occasional veteran drive from a firm’s back cupboard. All treated identically — one gentle image, then every repair on the copy.
Whatever arrives, the terms don’t move with the postcode: a free diagnostic first, a fixed figure in writing before any work — £250 + VAT for cards and sticks, £300 + VAT for any single drive, from £500 + VAT for RAID, NAS and servers — and on most jobs, no recovery means no fee. Every job is handled in-house by our own engineers and your data never leaves the UK.
Whoever can keep hands off it first — then anyone. The useful first call, on 0141 404 0294, is about what not to touch: no rebuilds, no chkdsk, no reboots for luck. After that, one person bringing or sending the disks with a note of what happened is all the process needs.
Not at all — the bench is brand-agnostic and age-agnostic, and mixed estates are the Lanarkshire norm. Seagate beside WD beside something beige from 2009: each gets the method its fault requires, and the same £300 + VAT single-drive band regardless of the label.
Power it down, pad it well, and choose your route — the counter at Tay House, 300 Bath Street (Mon–Fri 9am–5:30pm) or insured, tracked post from Coatbridge. Either way it’s diagnosed free and quoted in writing before anything is decided.
All data recovery services — diagnosis, imaging and recovery — happen at our Glasgow lab, whichever town the job starts in.
Stop using the drive. Every further read or write risks overwriting what is still recoverable, and on a failing mechanism it risks the heads touching the platters. If the machine is still on, shut it down properly and leave it off.
Don't run recovery software on the original. Consumer tools write their own index files to the disk they are scanning. On a healthy drive with deleted files that is often survivable; on a drive with bad sectors or a mechanical fault it turns a good outcome into a partial one.
Don't open the drive. A hard disk opened outside a filtered-air bench collects particles that score the platters within a few rotations. If it has already been opened, tell us — it changes the approach, not the willingness.
Remove the drive where you can. Please send the hard drive or SSD on its own; we are not able to accept complete laptops or desktop systems. Any computer shop will take it out in minutes. External drives are the exception — send those complete with the enclosure, because on many models the bridge board holds the encryption key and a bare disk reads as unformatted.
The diagnostic is free and it is a real one. The drive goes on the bench, not through a script: we identify the fault class, check whether the media is stable enough to image, and establish what is realistically recoverable before anyone talks about money.
Then you get a fixed figure in writing. Not a range, not an estimate that moves once work starts. You decide with the number in front of you, and on most jobs there is nothing to pay if the recovery does not succeed.
We image first, then work on the copy. The original is read once, as gently as the hardware allows, and every repair happens on that image. It is the difference between one careful attempt and a drive that degrades with each pass.
Everything is done in-house. Your drive is not couriered on to a partner laboratory, and your data does not leave the UK. When the recovery is complete you get a file listing to check before anything is returned, and the copy on our systems is securely wiped 30 days after you confirm you have it.