An Acer Aspire that had stopped booting after a botched Windows update, with months of coursework held on its single internal drive.
An Acer Aspire that had stopped booting after a botched Windows update, with months of coursework held on its single internal drive.
Opened in our clean-air environment, the drive had a head down in the stack. Laptop 2.5-inch drives are tightly packed and unforgiving — the heads sit very close together and the tolerances are tight — which makes working on them more delicate than on a desktop drive and makes gentle handling essential.
We fitted a matched donor head set, paired to the drive so the new heads read the platters correctly, and imaged it on a DeepSpar Disk Imager. Working head by head, we secured each healthy surface in full and saved the weakest until last, with the imager holding power and command timeouts in check so the fragile drive was never pushed too hard. The PC3000 covered the firmware side. This staged approach is what makes the difference on a head-damaged drive: capture the easy data first, then spend the drive's limited remaining life on the difficult areas.
From the image we rebuilt the file system and checked the dissertation, its references and the wider files opened correctly before writing them to fresh media.
We recovered the drive's data, the dissertation included in full, six working days later — comfortably before the deadline. A hard lesson learned painlessly: coursework should live in at least two places, because a single laptop drive is exactly the kind of thing that fails the week it matters most.
DeepSpar DDI · PC3000 — imaging and recovery carried out in-house. Every job is imaged before any recovery work begins, and the original media is never written to.
Send us your device for a free diagnostic, and tell us a little about what happened — an engineer will review it and confirm your exact quote in writing before any work begins.
Getting your data back begins with getting the device to us. Pack it up safely, pop your contact details inside, and send it over — once we’ve run the free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work starts.
Posting it? A tracked, insured service is what we’d recommend. Rather drop it in? You’re welcome Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm — just package the device up as above first.
Want a bit more detail first? Fill in the form with more about your issue and an engineer will review it and send you a custom quote.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 0191 406 1051.
Usually, yes. A dead laptop is often a motherboard fault sitting over a perfectly healthy drive — we take the drive out and image it on the PC3000, or recover a failed drive in our clean-air environment.
From £300 plus VAT, with no fix, no fee on most jobs and a fixed written quote before any work.
For most laptops the drive can be removed and sent on its own — a local computer shop will do it in minutes. Where the storage is soldered to the board, or you'd rather not open it up, send the whole laptop and we'll take care of removal and testing.
Start with an instant online quote, or call and talk it through with us first. You'll have a clear, fixed price before any work begins.