W3, W5, W13, UB1, UB2, UB5 and UB6
Data recovery for Ealing. In Southall the shop's books and the family's photographs share one desktop.
Ealing is not one place but seven, and the machines that arrive here say so. Southall's commercial core runs on family businesses: jewellers with stock photography and stone records, sari houses with supplier catalogues and pattern archives, cash-and-carries with stock and delivery records, caterers holding fifteen years of event history and the photographs from every one of them, travel and money-transfer offices with booking and compliance records, minicab firms with dispatch and driver data, and the accountancy practices that keep the books for all of them. In most of those offices the trade and the household sit on the same desktop, which is why a failure there is commercial and personal in the same hour. Filenames in Gurmukhi or Gujarati are not an obstacle: character encoding survives imaging, and files come back named as they were. Greenford and Perivale send light industry and distribution — CAD/CAM files and machine programs from firms where the programmer's own PC is the archive. Acton and the Ealing side of Park Royal send food manufacturers with production, batch and traceability records, along with the creative firms the borough's enterprise zone was drawn around. Ealing Studios on Ealing Green has been in production since 1902, and the supply chain around it sends project and post-production files. In W5, W7 and W13 it is a professional practice, or a household with a Mac and one external drive. Nothing is collected in this borough. The disk travels by tracked post, examining it is not charged for, and you know the figure before anyone starts.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
What the seven towns put on the bench.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A shop desktop that stops at the maker's logo | The books, the stock photographs and the family album, all on it | Leave it off. Only the disk needs to make the journey |
| A caterer's laptop that no longer finds its own disk | Fifteen years of event history and the photographs from each | Unplug it and post the drive, not the laptop |
| A machine shop PC caught restarting | Part programs, CAD/CAM files and the fixture drawings with them | No reinstall — it would write over what we are after |
| A production NAS that has dropped its volume | Rushes, project files and graded masters against a delivery date | Cut the power before a rebuild starts, then send it whole |
| A card from a wedding job the camera now reads as empty | It came out of the slot while the camera was still writing | Write nothing to it, run no recovery app, post it on |
Worth getting right before posting.
What Ealing asks first.
Is Southall covered as well as W5 and W13?
UB1 and UB2 are Southall's own post town — not London, and not Middlesex — and both are covered, along with W3 Acton, W5, W7 Hanwell, W13, UB5 Northolt and UB6 Greenford. Ealing uses four postcode areas, W, UB, NW and HA. None of that changes anything for you: nothing is collected from any address, and one list applies across the lot.
The filenames are in Gurmukhi. Will they survive?
Yes. A filename's encoding is stored with the file itself rather than added by the screen, so a read-only image preserves it and names come back written as they were — Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Tamil, accented Latin, whatever the machine held. Folder structures behave the same way. What you check before paying anything is a list of recovered files with their names intact.
A shop says the drive is beyond help. Is it?
Often not. A shop earns its living making a computer usable again, which is a different trade from reading a disk that has stopped answering, with different equipment standing behind it. Drives given up on elsewhere arrive here most weeks and image without complaint. Since the first look is free, finding out which of the two you have costs nothing.
It is the family machine and not a business one. Will you take it?
Most of what Ealing sends is exactly that. A desktop that runs the shop and the household at once. A laptop left in a back office for five years. One external drive carrying every photograph a family has ever owned. A card or a stick is the £250 + VAT band and a single drive £300 + VAT, and nothing is charged until you have looked over a list of the recovered files and said yes to it. This lab does not work on phones or tablets.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to Ealing, on the same terms
Post it from UB1 and learn what it needs at no charge.
Off at the wall, and nothing further until we have spoken. Describe the behaviour that preceded it stopping. No charge is made for the examination; the figure reaches you in writing, and it is yours to accept or refuse.