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MHDR / Towns we cover / Cookham

SL6 · the village, the Rise and the Dean

Data recovery for Cookham. Three settlements, one parish, one platform at the Rise.

Cookham is one parish holding three places. The village sits at the water with Holy Trinity and the High Street; Cookham Rise grew round the station; Cookham Dean is the high ground, where the last shop went with the post office in 2009. The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead is the council, SL6 is the postcode, and the way out is either the single-track branch — one train an hour off-peak, reversing at Bourne End for Marlow — or the A404 off Maidenhead Thicket. The working population is small and file-heavy: moorings and boatyards above Cookham Bridge with hull surveys and berth-holder records; kitchens along the High Street keeping the reservations diary and the supplier ledger on one back-office machine; a volunteer heritage sector with donated scans and catalogue spreadsheets; framers, illustrators and photographers whose masters sit on a single external drive; agents and surveyors holding floor plans, EPC data and flood-risk reports. Any of those disks, once it stops, goes by tracked and insured post to the Guildford intake laboratory, is read for nothing, and is quoted in writing a single time.

Tracked post · we pay the return Diagnosed at no charge on arrival A written price that holds

Describe the fault to an engineer
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Five disks Cookham keeps posting in.

None of these? Run the triage →
The symptomWhy it turns up hereStart here
A back-office machine from a High Street kitchen, dead on a MondayThe reservations diary and the supplier ledger share one hard diskLeave it switched off; the disk makes the journey, the tower stays
A boatyard drive holding hull surveys and berth-holder recordsThe survey is proof of a hull on one particular day, and that day is goneTell us the last thing it did, then stop asking it to do anything
An external SSD of photographic masters that no longer mountsFramers and illustrators work from one copy and go on working from itUnplug it now — nothing you run on a desktop will help an SSD
A two-bay NAS in a Cookham Rise spare room, quietly down to one diskOne disk can go without a sound; you find out when the other stopsPower it off at the front button and send the unit complete
A tower lifted off a ground floor that had water in itMoor Road, Sutton Road and the A4094 all have a level at which they closeNo hairdryer and no power: seal it while it is still damp and send it
If you post it in: post it to our intake lab tracked and fully insured, and slip the shipping form in beside the drive; we pay the return leg. How to pack it is covered in detail on the postage page.

What happens to a Cookham disk, in order.

The branch, the bridge and the A404Cookham Rise has a single platform on a single-track line — the passing loop went in the 1969 cuts — and the A404 runs from the Thicket up past Bisham. Neither of them carries a hard disk anywhere. A tracked, insured parcel booked before the last collection of the day is usually sitting on the bench when Guildford opens.
Packing beats distance, every timeMost of the damage a failed drive picks up arrives afterwards, on the journey rather than on the bench. Rigid box, padding against all six faces, nothing loose enough to shift, an anti-static bag if there happens to be one about. The postage page sets out the method and carries the form to print.
Where a computer sits, in a parish that floodsCookham Parish Council publishes the levels road by road: Moor Road, the B4447 west of the High Street, from 1.00m; the A4094 north of the bridge at about 1.12m; Sutton Road at Widbrook Common at 1.18m, which is also when the causeway becomes the emergency route. It is a plain argument for keeping a tower off a ground floor. If one has already been wet, leave it sealed — no warmth, no opening, no power.
The price list has never read a postcodeCards and sticks cost £250 plus VAT; a single drive £300; CCTV, DVR or NVR work £400; a NAS, a RAID, a server or anything with a second disk from £500; virtual machine images and forensic instructions £800. Diagnosis costs nothing and the figure is set down in writing once. No recovery, no fee applies to every job but three — forensic instructions, embedded recorder work, and repairs where donor components have to go inside the drive itself — and those three take a 50% deposit.

What Cookham callers ask first.

The envelope says Maidenhead. Where does the parcel actually go?

Maidenhead is the post town printed on an SL6 address, and the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead is the council; neither of them reads a disk. Media goes to the intake laboratory — Guildford Data Recovery at Guildford Business Park, GU2 8XH, Building 2, on the ground floor. Write that name on the label, because a courier holding a parcel addressed to this site can be turned away at the door. Tracked and insured on the way out; we pay for the journey home.

A ground floor here took water in January 2024. Is the computer worth sending?

Send it, and send it damp. The parish council's own table records a peak of 1.34m at Cookham Lock on 8 January 2024, with 1.46m in January 2003 and 1.36m in February 2014 before it. A disk that has been wet must not be warmed, opened or powered up: the residue left behind as it dries is what ends the platters, not the water itself. Bag it, note down whatever it was standing in, and get it into the post that day.

A boatyard server above the bridge has dropped two disks. What travels?

Ring 0800 6890668 first, weekday mornings or afternoons between 9am and 5:30pm, and say how many disks are in the set and what it had been doing when it stopped. A server or a RAID travels as bare disks: pull them, label them in bay order, wrap each one on its own. A NAS unit travels whole, and so does an external drive still in its enclosure. Nothing is imaged until a written figure is in front of you.

Does anyone drive up to Cookham Dean to pick it up?

Nobody does, and nobody does in Maidenhead either: no counter, no van, no driver. Cookham Dean has had no shop since the post office shut in 2009, and we have added nothing to it. Tracked, insured post is quicker and a great deal duller than a round trip. Guildford is open to weekday drop-offs, 9am until 5:30pm, if you would rather hand it over yourself. Free diagnosis either way, then one fixed written quote.

The rest of what Cookham sends us.

Soaked, damp or flooded → Encrypted by ransomware → Getting images back → Where we work, in full →

Next door to Cookham, on the same terms

Bourne End → Marlow → Windsor →

Ring, pack it rigid, and Cookham is one parcel away.

Nothing is decided until the free diagnosis is in: leave the device off, and tell us what happened to it.

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Ask for a free diagnosis Posting it to us