The town that made steel understands exactly what it means when hardware fails under load. Drives are less forgiving than girders — but the recovery run from Motherwell is short, and the diagnosis at the end of it is free.
By road it’s the A723 onto the M74, north to the M8 and off at Charing Cross — twenty-five to thirty minutes most of the day. Motherwell station runs direct trains into Glasgow Central all day long, which suits a padded drive in a work bag perfectly. And the post office option is as good here as anywhere: insured, tracked, next-morning arrival.
Motherwell’s casework runs industrial and domestic in equal measure: workshop PCs with a decade of job records, RAID boxes from units around the Strathclyde Business Park, and the family laptops that hold every photo since the wedding. The bench doesn’t distinguish — every drive is imaged once, gently, before anything else happens.
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 drive itself is what we need — pull it before sending, and any local computer shop will do that in minutes if you’d rather not open the tower. Label it, post it or drop it in; the machine can stay in Motherwell.
Completely — a powered-off drive in a padded box rides the Central line better than it survives another restart at your desk. Wrap it against knocks, keep it in hand luggage rather than a squashed bag, and it’ll arrive in exactly the state the bench wants it.
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 Motherwell. 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.