The flash was untouched — the controller had hung and nothing could reach it. A vendor-mode reset brought it back.
An ASUS laptop whose NVMe SSD had fallen out of the BIOS altogether — a controller failure, with live project files riding on it.
On our equipment the drive wouldn't present normally — consistent with a controller lock-up rather than worn or damaged flash. That distinction matters enormously: a hung controller is a recoverable fault, because the data underneath is untouched and simply needs a route back to it.
Using the PC3000 we put the SSD into the manufacturer's technical mode, cleared the fault condition and read out the controller's internal structures. The translator — the table that maps the logical drive onto the physical flash — had gone inconsistent, which was why the drive could no longer present itself; we rebuilt it, and with that corrected the logical drive reappeared and the file system dropped straight back into place. From there we imaged the drive to a copy.
We rebuilt the file system from the image and checked the full set of client work opened correctly, then wrote it all to fresh media.
The drive imaged cleanly and everything was returned four working days later, with no data lost. SSDs give very little warning before this kind of failure, which is the whole argument for keeping live work synced or backed up somewhere separate — a drive that's perfectly healthy one evening can be invisible by morning.
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.