Sent in from · Crowthorne RG45
Data recovery for Crowthorne. Where the zebra crossing was tested.
Crowthorne is a Bracknell Forest village of 7,806 people at the 2021 census, standing on sandy heath where the pines run north into Swinley Forest. For its size it is an unusually institutional place. Wellington College, founded in 1853, stands on four hundred acres of it; Norwood has run Ravenswood Village here since 1953; and Broadmoor Hospital, on the eastern edge, is a high-secure psychiatric hospital run by West London NHS Trust. The road research that occupied the Old Wokingham Road ground from 1966 to 2004 has gone — that land is Buckler's Park housing and Buckler's Forest open space now, with the banked concrete curve still in the trees — but the testing and consultancy trade it left behind did not, and neither did the habit of keeping a whole project on one working disk. Around them sit the ordinary RG45 trades: a practice with imaging on a machine nobody dares update, a tutor with a decade of recordings, a care office with rotas and care plans, a loft NAS holding the family. When one stops, nothing is collected. The parcel goes to Guildford, tracked and insured, and looking at it costs you nothing.
Describe the fault to an engineer
0800 6890668
Five faults, and what to do before you post.
None of these? Run the triage →| The symptom | Why it turns up here | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| A tutor's external drive, a decade of lesson recordings on it | Self-employed teaching runs on one disk and nobody else's IT department | Unplug it now, and say which term you need back |
| A test engineer's laptop, a fortnight of instrumentation output on it | A trial run happens once; the numbers cannot be gathered a second time | We recover, your IT rebuilds |
| A camera card that stopped between two sittings | A working photographer's masters exist nowhere until they are copied off | Eject it, bag it, and record nothing further on it |
| A four-bay NAS in a loft, running a disk short since spring | The array was treated as the backup, so no other copy was ever made | Shut it down instead of letting it rebuild |
| A care office desktop that will not come on at all | Rotas and care plans come off one machine, for people expecting them | Say which day they are needed for and the order follows that |
What happens once the box leaves RG45.
What Crowthorne rings up about.
Is the whole of RG45 covered, Buckler's Park and Ravenswood included?
Yes, and the parish around them. Bracknell, Wokingham, Sandhurst and Ascot have pages of their own here; Blackwater, Farnborough North and Ash are stops further down the same railway line, and are not claimed by this site. None of it is collected in any case. Media goes to the Guildford laboratory by tracked, insured post, so an RG45 address is worked in the order it arrives, the same as any other.
An external drive with years of lesson recordings will not mount. Is it worth sending?
Nearly always. A drive that clicks, spins up and stops, or mounts as an empty volume, is routine bench work, and nothing is charged for finding out which it is. Write down the folders you genuinely need and the date you are working to; that list gets read first, and the recovered copy is checked against it before you are asked for money. One drive on its own falls in the £300 + VAT band.
Our four-bay box says a disk has dropped out. Do we post the whole unit?
A NAS may be posted whole, just as it stands. A server or a RAID array may not: it comes apart, and the disks travel bare, each marked with its bay position — the member that dropped out weeks ago and was never swapped included. Leave the controller alone and begin no rebuild, because rebuilding onto a worn disk is the commonest way an array stops being recoverable at all. Two disks or more and the band starts at £500 + VAT.
Where does a Crowthorne parcel actually go, and what goes on the label?
To the intake laboratory, which is Guildford Data Recovery on Guildford Business Park, GU2 8XH — Building 2, ground floor. Put that name on the parcel rather than this site's, or a courier can be turned away at the door. Post it tracked and insured, and lay the shipping form in the box beside the drive. Someone is there on weekdays from 9am to 5:30pm to take a drop-off in person, and the leg home is paid for.
Also read, if you are in Crowthorne.
Next door to Crowthorne, on the same terms
A Crowthorne job starts with a label and a padded box.
Nothing is decided until the free diagnosis is in: leave the device off, and tell us what happened to it.