Scotland’s first new town was built on the idea that things should simply work — so a drive that suddenly doesn’t is an affront to the whole EK philosophy. The fix is twenty-five minutes away, and it starts with a diagnosis that costs nothing.
From the town centre it’s the A725 and M74 into Glasgow in twenty to twenty-five minutes, with Tay House sitting just off the M8 at Charing Cross. The rail option runs from East Kilbride station straight into Central. And the third route needs no diary at all: insured, tracked post, with the drive powered off and padded — it arrives calmer than most drivers do.
EK’s jobs skew practical: business machines from the industrial estates at Kelvin and College Milton, home-office laptops from the residential precincts, and the NAS boxes that quietly became the family vault. New-town efficiency, applied to recovery: diagnose, quote, fix, done.
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.
The postcode doesn’t change the clock — most single-drive jobs run three to five working days from arrival, imaging included, and the free diagnostic usually happens within a day of the drive landing. Genuine emergencies can use the priority track; ask when you call.
No — honestly, nobody should want a failing drive doing a courier’s rounds in a van. The two safe routes are your own hands to Bath Street or insured tracked post, both of which keep the drive padded, powered off and accounted for door to door.
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 East Kilbride. 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.