ADR / Media and machines / Toshiba laptops and drives

Toshiba · Satellite, Satellite Pro, Tecra, Portégé, Qosmio

Toshiba laptop data recovery, London. Post the drive and keep the laptop; on a Toshiba that is very nearly the whole job.

A single drive costs £300 + VAT. Nothing is charged for the assessment that precedes it. Four faults cover most Toshiba work. First and commonest, a 2.5in disk at the end of its hours — a lid with TOSHIBA on it puts the machine at 2019 or older, and its disk has been turning for every one of those years. Second, a password put on the drive in Setup, which no reinstall will touch. Third, flash soldered to the mainboard, as on a Click or a Chromebook, where there is nothing to unscrew. Fourth, BitLocker with the key mislaid. Which of the four it is decides the work and the figure together, and that is settled before a figure is spoken. Parcels reach us from Hackney, Wandsworth, Bromley, Richmond and Hammersmith.

On most jobs: no data, no bill A free look first, then one figure in writing Media posted in from Croydon, Ealing and Camden

Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633

Toshiba: what the symptom usually means.

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What is going on	The usual reason for it	Where that leaves you
It reaches the Toshiba logo and sits there	The disk can no longer serve up what Windows needs to start. Your documents are usually untouched	Take the drive out and post that
A tick, or a faint knock, from a Satellite	A tired 2.5in disk with heads nearing the end	Turn it off and keep it off
Setup wants a hard disk password nobody set	A password held in the drive's own firmware, where Windows never sees it	Tell us before the box is sealed
The M.2 card in a Portégé has dropped off the list	Its controller has stopped answering, while the flash behind that controller is frequently untouched	Post the card by itself
BitLocker wants its forty-eight digits	Genuine encryption, doing exactly what somebody set it to do	Find the key before you post
There is nothing in there to unscrew	On a Click or a Chromebook the flash forms part of the mainboard	The whole machine has to travel

Packing it and posting it:cushion it so nothing can shift about, insure the parcel at the value of the files and not the price of the hardware, and post it tracked. We meet the cost of the leg home. Prefer to walk the packing through with an engineer first, before the box is sealed? Ring us. Every bit of it is written down on theguide to packing and posting.

Four ways a Toshiba stops, and what each of them means.

Satellite and Satellite ProThese make up most of the work here: a 2.5in disk beneath a hatch on the underside, three or four screws, and out it lifts. The small ones break that rule. On a Click, a Chromebook or one of the little Satellites the flash is on the board, and then the whole laptop travels. Read the model number off the base to us, and before you reach for a screwdriver we will tell you which sort you own.

Tecra and Portégé, the work machinesWork laptops, and two extra things ride along with them. Setup lets a password be written onto the drive itself, into firmware where reinstalls never reach, and BitLocker may be layered on top of that. Neither should delay a phone call, and both are answered straight while the assessment still costs nothing.

The 1.8in disk in a PortégéNot every Toshiba drive is the usual 2.5in size. The thinnest Portégé models were built around a 1.8in disk with a connector of its own, and nothing standard will read one. Give us the model number from the underside and we will tell you which is in there before anything is opened.

Soldered flash, and what it altersThere is no drive of any kind to take out of a Click, a Chromebook or one of the smallest Satellites, because the flash is part of the mainboard. With nothing to unscrew, the laptop makes the trip, the work happens at board level, and how much can be reached is a thing the free assessment establishes rather than something promised up front.

From the box arriving to your files going back.

Work we have closed →

Logged the day it lands, and the first look costs nothing Free

A case number goes on it the day the parcel lands, and an engineer settles what has truly failed before anything else happens — free of charge, and first in the order of work. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.

Nothing to pay for lookingA single figure, put in writingNothing owed at this stage

The drive is out before anything gets power

Nobody here presses a power button hoping for a better answer. Out comes the storage — a 2.5in disk on most of them, an M.2 card on a late Portégé or Tecra — and behind a write blocker it settles the question worth asking this early: laptop, or drive? Where the laptop is the guilty party the job turns into a straight copy, and the figure drops accordingly.

A write blocker in front of itLaptop or drive, separated

An image is made before any repair

From then on every step runs against the image and none of them against what came out of the post. Where the heads have finished, the disk is opened under filtered air and takes a donor stack matched on model and production batch. Where flash grows unreliable as it heats, it is read in short bursts with cooling between, easy ground first and the difficult ground left until that is safely down.

Filtered air where heads have goneFlash read direct from the board

Opened up here before it travels

Our word is not enough on its own. What read back gets opened here — documents, spreadsheets, photographs, mail, music — and the folder tree is held up against the description you gave when you rang. Anything you called important is opened right through, not counted off a list.

Each file opened hereThe ones you named are checked first

You see the file list before you pay

What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge whatever. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have read those files on a machine of your own.

No charge until you accept the figureFresh media, supplied with the jobThe post home is ours

What arrives most often

That logo screen blames nobody — all it reports is that the machine could not read the files it starts from. Three unrelated faults produce it: a disk at the end of its hours, a broken Windows installation, or a drive that has shifted out of its connector. Reading the storage is the only way to learn which.
A few of these have nothing to take out — on a Click, a Chromebook or one of the smallest Satellites the flash is part of the mainboard itself. No panel to lift, no screw to turn, no card to slide out. Those machines come in whole and get read at board level, and they stand as the one exception to everything else written here.
The recovery partition is a trap on these machines — hold 0 while a Toshiba powers up and it offers to put the laptop back to how it left the factory. That is a rebuild, not a repair: it writes a fresh Windows over the top of the very files you are trying to reach. If somebody has already done it, say so, because it changes what is still there to find.
Locks are answered before you owe anything — a Tecra or a Portégé bought for work will often carry two, one password on the drive itself and BitLocker sitting over it, and neither opens without what it asks for. A BitLocker key hides in roughly four places: a Microsoft account, an employer's directory records, an old memory stick, a sheet of paper in somebody's file. Look in all four, then ring us whichever way it goes.

Two things this page will not soften: no laboratory defeats encryption without either the password or the recovery key in hand, whatever the advertising says, and a volume in that position stays shut. Second, a platter scored by a failing head no longer physically holds what those tracks held, and what has stopped existing is retrieved by nobody. Overwriting behaves the same way: a factory restore, then a few weeks of ordinary use, permanently costs you a share of what it once held. Both are said to you while the work is still free. The price for one drive is £300 + VAT, put on paper as soon as the free assessment ends, and three to four working days is the usual span between a parcel landing and new media going out. We take storage and nothing else: no phones, no tablets. Where a disk yields nothing whatever, most jobs carry no charge.

One job, followed all the way through.

LDN · ADR-2026-3401JOB LOGGED ✓

A year of slowing down, and then the EliteBook stopped at the logo

A land agent in Islington kept nine years of tenancy paperwork, valuations and site photography on an HP EliteBook the practice's IT had never once opened. Since the spring, everything had grown slower and slower to open. Then one morning it got as far as the logo and stayed there. The spinning disk was lifted out. Behind a write blocker it read, slowly, though a band round the middle refused to answer at any speed. That band waited while the rest of the surface was safely imaged, and was then worked in short passes over two nights. No file travelled anywhere until every folder had been opened on the bench here, the tenancy agreements and the valuations first, because those were the two named on the telephone.

Every lastfolder opened before going backThe entiredisk cloned before any repair

What helps, and what harms.

Do this much first

Turn it off now, and leave it off
Read us the screen, word for word
Say whether Setup ever had a password on it
Antistatic bag for the drive, and send that alone

What sets us back

Letting the factory restore run at start-up
Reinstalling Windows onto that disk
Turning Windows loose to repair a failing disk
Putting anything new onto the disk you want back

Questions answered before you commit.

It sticks at the Toshiba logo. Is the disk finished?

It might be, but the same screen appears for two or three other reasons and staring at it will not tell you which. All the machine is saying is that it could not read the files it starts from. A 2.5in disk with too many hours behind it will do that. So will a Windows installation that has broken, and so will a drive that has shifted out of its connector. Restarting only puts the weak area under the same load again. Leave it off, send the drive by itself, and a few minutes of free assessment tells the three apart.

Setup is asking for a hard disk password and nobody remembers setting one.

Toshiba business machines allow a password to be put on the drive itself. Windows holds no copy of it; the disk's own firmware does, which is why reinstalling Windows changes nothing. While it is set, a normal bench port gets no reply out of the drive, so tell us about it while you are still packing — it decides what the assessment tackles first. Where a Tecra or a Portégé was handed on by an employer, whoever configured it very often still has the password. Ask them before writing it off.

BitLocker wants forty-eight digits and we do not have them.

Then the volume stays shut. This is not a limitation of the bench. BitLocker is doing the job somebody configured it to do, and without the key it is shut to everybody, here and elsewhere. What is worth saying is that the key more often exists than not. Four places to look: a Microsoft account, an employer's directory records, an old memory stick, a printed sheet in a drawer. Meanwhile the volume can be imaged and the image kept safely while you hunt, and none of that costs anything.

Should the whole laptop come, or just the drive?

Just the drive, on almost every Toshiba. There is a panel on the underside; three or four screws behind it; and then the disk, or on a late Portégé the M.2 card, lifts straight out. Antistatic bag, padded box, finished. Sending a whole laptop costs more in postage and hands a courier more to break. Small models are the exception — a Click, a Chromebook or one of the little Satellites keeps its flash on the mainboard, so the machine itself has to make the trip. Ring if you cannot tell which you have. It all arrives by post, tracked and insured.

Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.

Servers that refuse to come up → A mirrored RAID 1 pair → After a ransomware incident → Every device we take →

Nothing gets worse while the power is off.

Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the drive switched off.

0203 0868633

Get it assessed Sending it to Guildford

Drives, cards and entire machines

Whatever it is doing now

Footage, evidence and reports

What it costs, and what follows