On a hard drive: no, and it is not even close. On an SSD: usually, but by accident rather than design. If you are about to sell a laptop, this is the difference that matters.
This is the single most consequential misunderstanding in consumer computing, and people act on it every day.
A factory reset, a Windows "Reset this PC", or a quick format does one thing: it removes the file system's index and declares the disk empty. It does not touch the data. Every document, every photograph, every saved password is still sitting on the platters exactly where it was written, in the same physical blocks, entirely readable.
Anyone with freely downloadable recovery software can pull it straight back off. Not a specialist. Anyone. It takes an afternoon and no particular skill.
If you sold or donated a laptop with a mechanical hard drive after "wiping" it that way, the person who bought it has your files — whether or not they have realised it.
SSDs behave differently, and the reason is TRIM.
When a reset or a format tells an SSD that blocks are no longer in use, the drive's garbage collection physically erases those cells in the background — often within minutes, quite independently of what the computer is doing. So the data really does go, and recovery really is unlikely.
But note what that is: a side effect of how flash manages wear, not a security feature. It is not verified, it is not certified, and it is not something to bet a GDPR position on. Nothing tells you it has completed. Nothing proves it happened.
Good enough for selling an old laptop on eBay. Not good enough for a machine that held client records.
Modern iPhones and Android phones are the exception, and they get this right. Because the storage is encrypted by default, a factory reset destroys the encryption key rather than trying to erase the data. Without the key, the data is mathematically inaccessible — it does not matter that it is still physically present.
That is a proper design. It is also why we do not offer phone recovery: it is a different discipline entirely, and we would rather turn the work away than do it badly.
A quick reset is not enough. The disk needs to be overwritten properly, or physically destroyed.
Under UK GDPR you have to be able to demonstrate that personal data was disposed of appropriately, and "we did a factory reset" is not a demonstration. You need a certificate with the drive serial numbers on it.
A drive that will not boot is not a drive that cannot be read. Failed drives are exactly what we recover for a living, and so does anyone who buys one out of a skip.
The genuinely simple answer. If BitLocker or FileVault has been on since the machine was new, then a reset destroys the key and the data goes with it — the same mechanism that makes phones safe.
Drop the drive at our Quayside reception, or post it to us — it costs nothing to find out what happened. You get a written figure from the fixed bands before any work begins.