HDR / The work we take on / Asus recovery

Asus laptops · VivoBook to ROG

Asus recovery in Hull. No boot device, a card that drops out when hot, a locked volume — most still reads.

One badge sits on four quite different machines, and what is under the keyboard depends on which range you bought and when. Four kinds of job come in from around Hull: a VivoBook whose firmware lists no drive at all, a ROG running two cards as one volume with half of it now missing, a thin ZenBook or a budget X-series with the flash soldered down, and a laptop wanting a BitLocker key that nobody kept. Which one you are holding decides what the job costs, so that is pinned down before you are quoted anything. Cards and disks are copied read-only first, and every tool we run afterwards sees that copy rather than your storage.

Most jobs: nothing back, nothing to pay Free to look at, then one fixed price Parcels come in from Beverley, Grimsby and Skegness

An engineer will take the details
0800 6890668

Putting a name to the symptom.

Nothing similar? Go to the triage →

What you see	What the fault is	What to try
No bootable device, on a black screen	The firmware found nothing it could start from	Take the card out and send that
One of two ROG cards has vanished	One half of a striped volume is missing, and the other half will not read alone	Send both cards, slots marked
A slow tick or a knock from an X-series	The heads have touched the platter	Leave the power off from here on
Windows asks for a BitLocker key	The volume has encrypted itself	Fetch the key before posting
A VivoBook with its flash soldered down	The storage is part of the mainboard	Then the whole laptop has to come in
A reinstall or a reset has been started	Fresh Windows writes over your files	Stop, and ring us

Sending it to us: pack it well, insure it for the full value and send it tracked to the Leeds intake lab. Return postage is ours. If you want an engineer to look over the packing before you tape the box shut, ring first. The detail is in the sending page.

Four Asus ranges, four different jobs.

ZenBook, the thin oneBuilt down to a thickness, and it shows inside: memory soldered, a single M.2 slot, and often a short 2230 or 2242 card in it, not the 2280 most guides picture. Reaching it means the whole base off, so it is bench work rather than kitchen-table work.

VivoBook and the X-seriesThe everyday machines. The bigger ones take an M.2 card and sometimes a 2.5in disk beside it, so there is something to unplug and post. The cheapest solder their flash to the mainboard, and those have to travel whole, screws and all.

TUF, the one that gets carriedSold on standing up to being knocked about, and mostly it does. What reaches us is either a machine that took a hard landing and now ticks, or one that has sat cooking in a bag all summer and started dropping its card mid-session. Neither improves with another restart.

ROG, and the heat it makesGaming machines run hot and often carry two M.2 slots, sometimes with the pair striped as a single volume straight from the factory. What we see most often is an NVMe controller that quits mid-session, returns once the machine is cold, then drops away again as the fans spin up. Those get read in short cold sessions, easiest regions first.

From the box arriving to the files going back.

Jobs we have logged →

A case number first, then a free diagnosis Free

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.

The diagnosis is freeOne price, put in writingNothing to pay yet

The card comes out first

We do not sit powering a machine up to see whether it catches this time. Where the M.2 card or the 2.5in disk lifts out, it goes onto a write-blocked port here, and one question is settled in minutes: is it the laptop that has failed, or the storage inside it?

Read on our own portLaptop or card, told apart

Copied cold, in short runs

Work happens on the copy, never on the card you sent in. An older X-series disk whose heads are damaged is opened in clean air and fitted with matched donor parts; an NVMe controller that overheats gets short reads with a cool-down after each, and the awkward regions are left until last.

Clean air for platter disksCards read cold, in bursts

Read through before it leaves

Nothing goes back on our say-so alone. Recovered files are opened here — photographs, documents, mailboxes — the folder tree is set against what you described, and anything you called critical is read from end to end.

Files opened, not countedThe folders you named first

You sign it off, then it comes back

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.

You approve the listing firstCopied onto new mediaReturn postage at our cost

What turns up most often

That message blames nothing — it says only that the firmware found nothing it could start from. A card that has worked loose, a controller that has stopped answering and a storage mode set wrong all look identical on that screen.
Short cards, not the ones pictured — thin ZenBooks and VivoBooks often take a 2230 or 2242 M.2, sometimes on a bracket in a longer slot, and the label seldom tells you SATA from NVMe. Tell us which card came out and where it sat.
Two cards can be one volume — some ROG machines shipped with the pair striped through Intel's RAID, so one card is half a file system and reads as nothing alone. Never let either be reinitialised.
BitLocker switches itself on — a laptop set up with a Microsoft account can encrypt its drive without anybody deciding to, and the key ends up filed in that account. Get hold of it before the parcel goes.

Where this one stops: soldered flash has a hard edge — cells and controller share one package, so once that controller has gone there is no route to the data. A striped pair with one card properly dead is the other: what survives is part of every large file and no more. Neither is kept from you — it is stated at the free diagnosis, before there is anything to pay.

One case from the casebook.

HU · HUL-2026-0851LOGGED ✓

The ROG card that dropped out whenever the fans came up

It came in from a joiner's office in Goole: a ROG with two cards, the second one holding a year of site photographs and quotes. It had been disappearing from Windows twenty minutes into a session and coming back the next morning, which points at a controller getting too hot rather than a disk wearing out, and every reboot to check spent a little more of what was left. Here the card went onto a write-blocked port under a fan and was read in runs of a few minutes with a cool-down between them, the easy regions taken first and the slow ones left to the end. Three passes filled almost every gap the first had left. A short run of sectors never answered at all, and the report says where they fall. The three folders he had asked for were opened and looked through on the bench rather than counted off a list.

Three of three folders backWhole card copied before anything

Before you box it up.

Do these first

Switch it off now and unplug the charger
Copy the message on screen word for word
Say which range: ZenBook, VivoBook, ROG, TUF
Send the card by itself in an antistatic bag

What not to do

Rebooting to see if it clears this time
Running an Asus recovery image over the top
Letting chkdsk loose on a clicking drive
Writing anything new to the failing card

Asked most weeks, answered here.

The Asus says there is no bootable device. Is the drive gone?

Not necessarily. That message only tells you the firmware found nothing it could start from, which is as true of a card that has worked loose or stopped answering as it is of a dead one. Leave the machine off instead of restarting it a dozen times, lift the card out, write down which slot held it, and post that alone. The bench settles the question in minutes.

My ROG has two SSDs showing as one drive, and half of it has failed.

Then the pair is striped, and some ROG machines shipped that way from the factory through Intel's RAID. Both cards hold part of every large file, so neither reads alone and neither should be reformatted. Send both, marked with the slot each came from. If one is genuinely dead we say so at the diagnosis: what comes back is whatever sat inside the surviving stripes, mostly small files.

Windows is asking for a BitLocker key nobody has.

That happens on laptops set up with a Microsoft account, where encryption goes on without anyone choosing it. The key is filed in that account — sign in from another computer and look under your devices; on a work machine the IT department holds it. Lacking the key, an encrypted volume is shut to this bench as well. Find it before you post anything.

The VivoBook's storage is soldered down. Is that it?

Not on its own. On the cheaper VivoBook and X-series models the flash is soldered to the mainboard: nothing unplugs, so the laptop has to travel whole, base and screws included. Where the board has failed but the chip itself is sound, there is usually a way in. Where the controller inside that chip has gone, there is not, and no bench anywhere opens it. You hear which of the two you have at the diagnosis, before a penny is payable.

What people read after this.

A stopped server → Wallet files → Locked up by ransomware → Everything we take in →

A drive left switched off loses nothing more.

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.

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