Devices · laptops and desktops
Two very different faults hide behind the same sentence. Most often the screen, the board or the charging circuit has gone while the drive behind them is untouched. Sometimes the drive itself has failed, and that is a different piece of work. Either way, the drive is the part we want, wherever in Hull the machine comes from.
An engineer will take the details
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| What you see | What the fault is | What to try |
|---|---|---|
| HP: Hard Disk 1 (301), the SMART Hard Disk Error | The disk's own SMART data has failed it, and the BIOS refuses to boot | Take it seriously. Image it now |
| HP: Boot Device Not Found (3F0) | Nothing bootable is being detected | A cable off its seat, or a dead drive |
| Dell: Error Code 2000-0142 | ePSA has failed the drive, and it is usually the heads | Do not run it a second time |
| Dell: Error Code 2000-0146 | The drive's log has been filling with errors for a while | This did not start today |
| Lenovo BIOS 2100: HDD0 (Main HDD) detection error | Nothing responds on that channel — a lead, or a dead disk | Image it first. Check the cable after |
| A disk read error occurred, then Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart | The boot sector is unreadable, and maybe much else besides | Another reboot will not help |
| Reboot and Select proper Boot Device | The BIOS finds nothing it can boot | Find the fault before reinstalling |
Each item that arrives gets a case number the day it lands. An engineer looks at it and finds the real fault, and that costs you nothing. You are told in plain terms which files can come off the drive and which cannot. A price follows — one figure, written down. No work starts until you have seen it and agreed to it.
If it unclips, it comes out on arrival, and the empty machine sits on a shelf until the end of the job. Soldered flash gives you nothing to unplug, so the board becomes the job and each chip is read where it sits.
A drive that has actually failed joins the ordinary HDD or SSD work. Where the disk is fine and the machine is dead, an image is all it needs.
Documents, the desktop, mail stores and whole user profiles come back in the folders they lived in, on new media. Nothing is invoiced until you have seen the file listing and agreed it.
You are not billed while you are still thinking. The list of what came off the drive goes to you first, and the invoice waits on your word. Files go home on media bought in for the job, with the postage back on us. We keep the job open until you have opened them on your own machine.
What comes in from Hull, Beverley and Grimsby says the same thing: when a manufacturer's own test blames the disk, the disk has generally failed. The loose cable everybody hopes for is the rare one. After that it is a standard drive job, run as described on the hard drive and SSD pages.
The laptop itself was finished, and the disk in it was clicking. A donor head stack was fitted, imaging ran at a crawl, and three days on she had her lesson plans, her reports and five years of marks back.
Where the drive sits on a caddy or under one screw, post it by itself. It is cheaper to send, and a small parcel comes through the post better than a whole laptop. Any repair shop will have one out inside two minutes. If the flash is soldered down, or you cannot tell, send the machine as it is.
Nearly always. Screens, mainboards and charging circuits finish off far more laptops than drives do. Getting a sound disk out of a machine that will not run again is one of the easier jobs here, and usually one of the cheaper ones.
Only if the key does not come with it. Put the password or the 48-digit recovery key in the parcel and the encrypted volume is ordinary work, several a week. Without either, it stays shut, which is the whole point of it. Find yours before you post anything.
Often plenty. An install writes over part of the disk and leaves the rest untouched. What eats into the remainder is everything done since — so stop using the machine, shut it down and leave it be.
Leave it switched off. A failing drive has a limited number of starts in it, and each one spends a little more. The free diagnosis will say which files can be read.