Ayrshire’s big town has blended and bottled, printed and engineered — and now, like everywhere, it keeps the lot on drives. When one fails, the M77 makes Kilmarnock-to-diagnosis one of the smoothest runs on this page.
The M77 was practically built for this errand — Kilmarnock to the M8 and Charing Cross in thirty to thirty-five minutes, barely a roundabout involved. The rail alternative runs from Kilmarnock station into Glasgow Central. And the parcel route holds its universal promise: insured, tracked, padded, next morning in the same queue as the walk-ins.
Killie’s casework reads like the town: engineering and print-trade machines with decades of job files, farm-office laptops from the Ayrshire hinterland, whisky-heritage archives, and the family externals that hold every photo since the scanner project of 2008. One method for all of it — image gently, repair on the copy, verify, return.
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.
No — we don’t run vans or couriers at all, deliberately: a failing drive is safest making one journey, not doing rounds. Royal Mail and the parcel firms reach every Ayrshire farm road, and an insured tracked box from the nearest counter works perfectly. Powered off and well padded, a drive doesn’t care how rural its postcode is.
Handled as standard: all work in-house by our own engineers, media stored securely, nothing outsourced, and your data never leaves the UK. If your trade or clients require an NDA, say so when the drive arrives and it’s signed as part of the job, not a favour.
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 Kilmarnock. 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.