Laptops fail for many reasons, and the most common is the drive itself — a spinning hard drive in older machines, an M.2 NVMe SSD in nearly everything recent. A repair shop can usually get the laptop itself working again, but the data on the failed drive is often written off as lost forever. It usually isn’t — recovering it just takes specialist equipment and experience that repair shops don’t carry, which is why shops across Merseyside send their customers’ failed drives to us.
Dragon Data Recovery works on failed laptop drives daily at our own laboratory — spinning drives, SATA SSDs and NVMe alike. One modern wrinkle worth knowing: most recent Windows laptops quietly encrypt their drives with BitLocker. That’s no obstacle if you have your Microsoft account login or the recovery key — but without either, no lab anywhere can decrypt your data, so it’s worth locating that key early (it’s usually saved to your Microsoft account online).
Listed below are some common signs that your laptop has a storage problem. Laptops do plenty of strange things when a drive is failing — if your symptom isn’t listed, describe it on our enquiry form and we’ll tell you what you’re dealing with.
Is your Laptop demonstrating any of these faults?
- Does the laptop freeze, crash or blue-screen when opening certain files or folders?
- Are there any unusual beeps or messages when booting up the Laptop?
- Is the Laptop completely dead? No life in it whatsoever?
- Has the Laptop become inaccessible?
- Is the Laptop noticeably slower in handling your files?
- Are your files disappearing?
- Has the Laptop been physically damaged?
- Has the Laptop been affected by a power surge or lightning strike?
- Can you hear any strange clicking sounds when powering up the Laptop device?
- Do you get error messages stating ‘no hard drive found’?
- Is the Hard drive not visible in the Laptop’s BIOS?
If your laptop is doing any of the above, power it off and leave it off — every restart of a failing drive risks the data that’s still recoverable. Start your enquiry here and we’ll reply with the likely pricing tier and clear next steps, with no obligation.
Typical Laptop Related Data Recoveries
- Acer
- Advent
- Alienware
- Asus
- Dell
- Dell Latitude
- Fujitsu
- Hewlett Packard
- HP EliteBook
- Lenovo
- Medion
- Microsoft
- MSI
- Razer
- Samsung
- Zoostorm
Common Laptop Hard Drive Issues
Laptop drives of every type and brand fail — through drops and knocks, overheating, wear, or simply age. Laptops get carried around, sat on soft surfaces that block their vents, and knocked off sofas, so their drives lead hard lives. These are some of the failures we recover from every week:
- Beeping sound
- Buzzing sound
- Click of death
- Clicking sound
- Corrupt file system (NTFS, APFS, HFS, HFS+)
- Deleted or missing data / files
- Disk detected but not opening
- Disk not mounting
- Failed SSD
- Firmware or manufacturing faults
- Formatted hard drive
- HDD failure
- Head crash
- Physical damage
- Printed circuit board (PCB) failure
- Read/write failure
- SMART errors, warnings and failures
If you want to avoid further data loss at this stage, we recommend:
- Stopping trying to access your defective laptop.
- Please do not dismantle your laptop in any way.
- Please never open the lid of any Hard Drive, they are sealed for a reason.
- Don’t reinstall Windows or run chkdsk repeatedly on a drive that’s misbehaving — both write to the drive and can overwrite the data you’re trying to save.
- Start your enquiry here for a no-obligation assessment.
What does laptop data recovery cost?
Logical recoveries — corrupted, formatted or deleted data on a drive with no mechanical fault — start from £350 including VAT. Mechanically failed drives needing cleanroom work, such as clicking or dropped drives, start from £450 including VAT. You don’t need to remove the drive yourself — send or bring the whole laptop and we’ll handle it. Every case gets a proper diagnosis first (typically 3–7 days), then a fixed written quote for your approval before any chargeable work begins — no upfront payment, and most completed recoveries are back with their owners within 6–10 days of approval. Laptops can be dropped off at our Moreton laboratory by appointment, collected by courier, or sent by Royal Mail Special Delivery Guaranteed. If we can’t recover meaningful data, there’s no recovery fee.
About Our Data Recovery Laboratory
Dragon Data Recovery is a genuine recovery laboratory — not a shopfront that forwards drives on. Every recovery happens at our own lab on the Wirral, on professional equipment: Ace Laboratory PC-3000 systems, DeepSpar Disk Imagers and a class 100 clean room facility for mechanical work.
You deal directly with the engineers handling your case, you approve a fixed written quote before any chargeable work begins, and if we can’t recover meaningful data, there’s no fee to pay.
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