A town that once built ships and later built computers for the world knows hardware has a lifespan — Greenock’s IBM years left the whole coast unusually clear-eyed about that. When a drive reaches the end of its own, the route east is forty minutes and the diagnosis is free.
From Greenock the A8 becomes the M8 and runs you into Charing Cross in about forty minutes. The Inverclyde line does the same journey from Greenock West and Central stations into Glasgow Central, no changes, drive on your lap. Or let the mail do the miles — insured and tracked, an Inverclyde parcel posted today is on the bench tomorrow morning.
The coast sends a distinctive mix: maritime and logistics records from the working waterfront, machines from the town’s electronics-heritage firms, family photo archives with a hundred years of shipyard faces in them, and the usual clicking externals. Every job gets the yard discipline — measured, imaged, fixed 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.
Often, yes — a powered-off drive in two inches of padding experiences less stress in the mail than on a car’s parcel shelf down the A8. Either route is safe done properly; what damages drives is neither miles nor mail but power-ons. Keep it off, pack it well, choose freely.
With the phone, before anything is pulled or rebuilt: 0141 404 0294. You’ll get the safe shutdown-and-photograph routine in five minutes, then send every member disk — including any marked failed — in numbered bays or bags. Multi-disk work is quoted to the job from £500 + VAT.
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 Greenock. 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.