Devices · notebooks and desktop PCs
One sentence covers two entirely separate faults. Usually it is the display, the mainboard or the charging circuitry that has failed, with the disk behind them perfectly intact. Occasionally the disk is the thing that went, and that makes for different work. In both cases, wherever in Plymouth the laptop failed, it is the disk we are after.
You will be talking to an engineer
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| What shows up | What that points to | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| HP 301: SMART Hard Disk Error on Hard Disk 1 | SMART has declared the disk failed, and the BIOS will not boot it | Believe it. Image the disk today |
| HP: Boot Device Not Found (3F0) | No bootable device is being seen | An unseated connector, or a dead disk |
| Dell: Error Code 2000-0142 | ePSA has failed the disk; heads are the usual reason | Do not put it through again |
| Dell: Error Code 2000-0146 | Errors have been accumulating in the disk's log for some time | The trouble began well before today |
| Lenovo 2100: HDD0 (Main HDD) detection error in BIOS | That channel answers nothing — cabling, or a dead disk | Image before you go looking at cables |
| A disk read error occurred, followed by Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart | Nothing can be read from the boot sector, and maybe well beyond it | Restarting it again changes nothing |
| Reboot and Select proper Boot Device | The BIOS can find nothing to boot from | Diagnose it before any reinstall |
Whatever arrives is booked in under a case number on the day it reaches the bench. An engineer then works out the actual fault, and that part is free. You get a plain answer on what can come off the drive and what cannot, followed by one price in writing. Nothing further happens until you have read it and agreed.
Anything that unclips is removed the day it lands, and the emptied machine waits on a shelf until the work is done. Soldered flash offers nothing to disconnect, so the board itself becomes the job and every chip is read in place.
A disk that genuinely failed joins the usual HDD or SSD queue. Where the machine is finished but the disk is sound, an image is the whole task.
Documents, the desktop, mail stores and entire user profiles return on new media, in the folder structure they sat in. No invoice is raised until you have read the file listing and approved it.
Thinking it over costs you nothing. Everything the drive gave up is listed for you before any invoice exists, and the bill only follows your go-ahead. Files travel back on media bought in for your job, with return carriage paid at this end, and the case stays on the bench until you confirm they open on your own computer.
The machines arriving from Plymouth, Tavistock and Truro all tell the same story: where a maker's own diagnostic points at the disk, the disk has usually gone. That loose cable everyone hopes for turns up rarely. From there it is ordinary drive work, handled as the hard drive and SSD pages describe.
The laptop was scrap, but the disk inside it was only clicking. Donor heads off a matching drive went on, the copy was taken slowly, and three days later she had five years of marks, her reports and her lesson plans back.
If the disk lifts out on a caddy or from behind a single screw, send just the disk. Postage is less, and a small package survives the journey better than a laptop does. Any repair shop can take one out in a couple of minutes. Where the flash is soldered to the board, or you are unsure, send the machine whole.
Almost always. Far more laptops are finished off by screens, mainboards and charging circuits than by their disks. Lifting a healthy drive out of a machine that will never run again is among the least demanding jobs here, and among the cheaper ones.
Only where the key is missing. Include the password or the 48-digit recovery key with the parcel and an encrypted volume becomes routine work; we handle several weekly. With neither, it stays locked, which is exactly what it was designed to do. Locate yours before posting.
Frequently a good deal. An installation covers one part of the disk and leaves the remainder as it was. What consumes the remainder is everything done afterwards, so shut it down, leave it alone and stop using the machine.
The diagnosis is free, and it comes back as a list: which files read, which do not, and what getting them off would take. Until then, leave the drive unplugged.