AL7 and AL8 · Welwyn Garden City
Data recovery, Welwyn Garden City. A dataset under retention, on one laptop. Much of what AL7 sends this way.
Recovering a memory card or a USB stick costs £250 plus VAT. Any one drive, hard disk or SSD, laptop or Mac, is £300 plus VAT. Add a second disk to the job, meaning RAID, a NAS or a server, and the band begins at £500 plus VAT. Establishing which one you are in is free. Welwyn Garden City has a real industrial base rather than a dormitory economy, and that shows in what arrives from AL7. Laboratory and pharmaceutical work rests on instrument raw data — chromatography, mass spectrometry, plate readers — with LIMS exports, electronic lab notebooks, stability study data, batch records and validation documentation behind it, all of it held to data-integrity expectations and defined retention periods. That is why a dataset which will not open here is a regulatory matter and not merely a commercial inconvenience. Roche's UK business is in the town. Tesco House on Shire Park — an ICI works before it was anything else — has been the grocery head office since 2016, when it moved up from Cheshunt: category and range plans, supplier and buying files, promotional calendars, price files, store-level extracts, and an enormous informal layer of analyst spreadsheets that no system ever captured, most of it living on individual laptops. PayPoint keeps its head office here too, with the transaction, terminal and reconciliation records that go with payments. Around all of that sit the practices, consultancies and small firms of AL7 and AL8, one machine apiece. Nothing is fetched from anywhere. The media is posted, examining it costs nothing, and the figure is on paper before any chargeable work starts.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
What AL7 and AL8 send in.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A laboratory PC that will not mount its disk | Instrument raw data and the batch record that depends on it | Leave it powered down; the disk travels by itself |
| An analyst's laptop that stops part-way through starting | Model files and spreadsheets that never reached a network share | No reinstall, and no repair shop first |
| A four-bay NAS upstairs that no longer mounts | Client files under retention, worked on by six people | Power it off at the wall and send it assembled |
| A validation USB stick the PC now calls empty | Qualification documents nobody printed a copy of | Do not reformat it; post the stick exactly as it is |
| An external drive that clicked once and then stopped | Twenty years of scanned records, held in one place | That noise is contact damage. Cut the power now |
Before you tape the box up.
Four questions from AL7 and AL8.
Is Welwyn Garden City the same post town as Welwyn?
It is not, and the difference matters locally. AL7 and AL8 are the WELWYN GARDEN CITY post town and both lie wholly inside Welwyn Hatfield; AL8 is the western half with Lemsford, AL7 the eastern half including Shire Park. AL6 is WELWYN, the village, a separate post town reaching into two more districts, and AL9 and AL10 are Hatfield. Only the letters are shared with St Albans. Whichever you write on the parcel, one published sheet applies.
The raw data sits under a defined retention period. How is it handled?
As the record it is. Your media is never written to: imaging is read-only, it comes before anything else is tried, and each attempt afterwards runs against the image instead of the disk, so what you posted goes home in the state it left in. A case reference stands in for your organisation on the paperwork, an engineer reads no more of the disk than the recovery needs, and thirty days after the media returns the working copy here is erased. You get the data on fresh media plus a file-by-file account of what read and what refused.
A rebuild has been running on the array since yesterday. Stop it?
Stop it now, not at the end of the day. A rebuild works through every sector on each disk still in the set, and that sustained load is what finishes off the next tired member. Take the power away, mark every disk with the bay number it came out of, and send them bare. A NAS goes the other way and comes to us intact. Multi-disk work opens at £500 + VAT.
How does a disk get from AL7 across to the bench?
By post. Welwyn Garden City has no counter and London has none either, so the parcel does the travelling. Insured and tracked from any post office nearby, it is normally booked in here on the following working day. Send the disk by itself; the computer is not wanted. There is no charge for the examination, and we cover the postage back.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to Welwyn Garden City, on the same terms
Send it from AL7 and find out what it costs for nothing.
Keep it switched off; a machine restarted over and over gives away a little more of itself each time. On the phone, describe the behaviour that came before it stopped. Examination carries no charge, the resulting figure is set down in writing, and chargeable work waits until you approve that figure.