PL30 & PL31 · Bodmin
Bodmin data recovery. Warehouse servers off the A30, shop-floor PCs, a moor farm's only computer.
Bodmin sits in mid-Cornwall, south-west of the moor that carries its name, where the county's two trunk roads meet — the A38 up from Plymouth joins the A30 here. The parish held 16,909 residents at the 2021 census. It was Cornwall's county town from 1838, but the council moved to Truro in 1889 and the courts followed in 1988, so the work now is distribution, light manufacturing and farming rather than administration: stock records on a back-office server, CAD and CNC files on a shop-floor machine, a moor farm's accounts on the only computer in the house. Bodmin has no main-line station of its own — Bodmin Parkway sits away to the south-east, out towards Lanhydrock — so a lot of these drives never had a second copy made. Whatever has failed, keep it switched off. Post it — tracked and insured — and it reaches the intake lab in Bristol, which gives it a free look the day it lands.
You will be talking to an engineer
0800 6890668
Five jobs that come in from around Bodmin.
Yours not here? Start at the triage →| What shows up | Why it ends up here | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A stock-control server has dropped its second disk | One more failure and a warehouse's whole record set is unreadable | Switch it off, refuse the rebuild, keep the disks in bay order |
| A shop-floor PC full of CNC programs will not start | The part programmes often live only on the machine that runs them | Lift the disk out, leave the PC alone, and post the drive by itself |
| The farm computer has begun to click when you switch it on | Livestock, stewardship and accounts, all on the one machine in the house | Pull the plug now and do not keep trying to boot it |
| A dropped external drive of scans and photographs will not mount | A volunteer's archive of drawings and images, kept at home, with no copy | Leave it unplugged, pad it well, and send just the drive |
| A yard-gate recorder that plays nothing back | A DVR overwrites its own disk day and night and tires it out early | Switch it off so it stops overwriting, and send the whole recorder |
Four things worth settling before it leaves Bodmin.
The questions Bodmin asks.
Do you cover Bodmin itself and the parishes out around the moor?
Yes — PL30 and PL31 and the parishes beyond them. Media goes to the intake lab in Bristol, so either post it tracked or run it there yourself: east on the A30 to Launceston, over the Tamar at no toll, then Exeter and the M5. The first look is free the day it arrives, and the return postage is on us.
A disk in our stock server has failed and it wants to rebuild. What now?
Switch it off and leave it off. Do not let the controller rebuild — putting fresh writes onto a disk that was already failing turns an array we could still have read into one we cannot. Note which bay each disk sat in, send them out of the chassis, and each is copied singly before the set is rebuilt.
Everything the office runs on is on one PC that never got backed up. Can it be read?
Usually. Matter files, quotes, drawings and the accounts tend to sit on a single machine nobody thought of as a server, and a deadline will not wait for it. Slide the disk out, stand the machine to one side, and send only that drive.
Can a driver come to Bodmin and pick the drive up?
No — there is no van and no counter, here or in Plymouth. Tracked, insured post gets there faster than any driver could, and should you prefer to bring it in person, the Bristol lab takes weekday drop-ins. Ring first if it is an odd shape and we will settle the packing on the call.
Pages people open after this.
Next door to Bodmin, on the same terms.
Post it from Bodmin, and it is on the bench the same day.
Keep it powered down. Tell us how it failed. Nothing is agreed until the free diagnosis has said what the fault is.