The Data Recovery Process and Life Expectancy of the device.
It should also noted that by the time any data storage item is sent to us it has almost reached the end of its life. The recovery procedure normally marks the last chance of life for it. The repair procedure is merely to get the data off the device and marks the final resting place of the hard drive / flash memory / usb memory stick! In any event we would never recommend re-using any failed/repaired data storage device. Your data is simply too important and precious to risk it.

Precautions to protect your data during recovery?
We take a 'belt and braces' approach when it comes to recovering your data. If we use any specialist software, it is verified 'read-only' software, and we also take the added precaution of installing a 'data-write blocker' which physically prevents writing any data to your disk. This equipment costs several thousand pounds. Never let anyone near your data who simply relies on software alone not to corrupt or accidentally overwrite your data. We also only work on 'clones' of your original data leaving the original intact in a forensically sound manner. Not all companies take this additional step.

Speed of recovery
We understand that when you have lost your data, speed of return is essential. You may have staff waiting to proceed. The sooner we see the disk the sooner we can start to advise you of the likely timescale. Every job is different and may range from an hour for emailed corrupt files to several days for damaged hard drives. We will provide you regular information throughout recovery and if required part-ship data back to you to enable your business to continue functioning.

Your data privacy is a priority for us.
We have full non-disclosure and privacy agreement for any data recovered to protect your privacy.
We are not interested in the content, only getting the data off your hard drive CD, DVD, or memory card.

Returning your recovered data or repaired file.
The data will be given to you on either DVD, CD, Email, or another hard drive. You choose!
Note we supply hard drives for those that require their data back on a hard drive, and we would be pleased to quote you the additional cost of this based on the size of hard drive and your personal requirements.

Data Recovery from Removable Storage Devices & Memory Cards (Excluding Hard Disk Drives - See Below)	Data Recovery Cost guide (ex VAT)
Floppy Diskettes Failure / Formatted / Deleted IOMEGA 100MB 250MB ZIP Disks MAC or PC	£ 95.00 - £250.00
CD-ROM, CD-R CD-RW unreadable	£ 95.00 - £250.00
DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW unreadable IOMEGA Jaz disks	£ 95.00 - £350.00
Specialist for USB Pen Drive, USB 2.0 Memory Stick, Compact Flash Card, Smart Media, SONY Memory Stick, IBM Micro Drive, Secure Digital SD Card, Multimedia Memory Card (MMC), xD Memory Cards, Magic Gate USB Pen Drives, Flash Card™, Smart Media™, SONY Memory Stick™, IBM™ Micro Drive, Multimedia Card, Secure Digital Card, Sandisk mini Cruzer, Lexar JumpDrive Flash Memory, Dell USB Memory Key, Belkin Flash Drive USB2.0, Kingston DataTraveler USB 2.0 Flash Drives or any other data memory cards for digital cameras or digital photographs / photos / photo	£ 95.00 - £350.00

Note there may be small additional cost to the above if the Floppy, CD, DVD, Memory card has suffered mechanical damage or damaged electronics. We shall notify you as soon as possible.

Hard Disk Drive Data Recovery Prices (based on a typical 40GB drive)
Please call us to discuss your specific requirement or situation

If you wish to discuss any of the above our contact details are here

We aim to keep our prices low.
Most of our work comes through referrals. We don't wish to pay for massive marketing and advertising campaigns used by the larger national data recovery services. We keep our overheads low, enabling us to offer you a low price from a local Staffordshire data recovery firm. We are simply determined to be No.1 for data recovery in Staffordshire.

You can also refer to our Hard Disk Drive Failure diagnosis guide in our Hard Disk Drive KnowledgeBase.

Desktop Laptop Notebook SATA IDE SCSI USB & Firewire IEEE1394 harddisks
Professional data recovery and repair facility for desktop, mobile and laptop notebook harddisks, master/slave discdrives, USB Firewire hard discs, and have our own Class 100 clean room facilities as required by harddisc manufacturers for rebuilding failed drives. Hard Drive Password removal / recovery Blue screen of death.

Repair / Recover Hard Drive Manufacturers
Western Digital, Fujitsu, IBM, Hitachi, Toshiba, Quantum, Seagate, Lacie, Conner, TEAC, Samsung, Kalok

Repair / Recover fix Mechanical / Electrical / Firmware Hard Diskdrive Problems
Hard Disk Drive not recognised in BIOS. Dropped harddiscs, smoking harddrives!
Hard Disk Drive Noisy, Clicking, Scraping, Sound. Disc Drive Head crashes.

Repair / Recover from following Operating File Systems
Data recovery for FAT FAT32 EXT2 EXT3 XFS and NTFS file systems.
Linux with ext2fs, xfs, reiserfs & jfs filesystems on standalone & RAID volumes
Recover from partitions, even if the boot sector or FAT has been erased or damaged (does not work with the NTFS file system)
Recover files with the original time and date stamp
Recover files on network drives
Recover from all Win 95, Win 98, Win ME, NT 4.0, Windows™ XP and Windows™ 2000 systems.

Recovery of files, even when a header entry is no longer available from the following file formats:
ARJ AVI BMP CDR DOC DXF DBF XLS
EXE GIF HLP HTML HTM JPG JPEG JPEGS JPEG's LZH MID
MOV MP3 PDF PNG RTF TAR TIF WAV
ZIP Cubasis (music sequencing software) and WAV files

Recover / retrieve files in the following situations
- UNC Uncorrectable Data Error - especially Maxtor SATA
- Mains Power Surge
- Reversed power polarity / voltage from incorrectly plugging in power leads or cable
- Corruption of file systems FAT
- Corrupt Files
- Recycle Bin emptied or files were deleted without Recycle Bin
- Hardware or software failures
- Power failure
- HDD (Hard Disk Drive) not recognised in BIOS, computer not detecting harddiscs
- Virus attack
- Formatted Hard drives
- System shutdown
- Partitioning or boot-up sector problems
- Controller pcb Board failure / burnt
- Discdrive making repeated clicking sound
- No spin on diskdrive motor
- Forgotten or Lost Password removal from Hard Disk

Data recovery from flash / USB memory media cards including -
Specialist for USB Pen Drive, USB 2.0 Memory Stick, Compact Flash Card, Smart Media, SONY Memory Stick duo pro, IBM Micro Drive, Secure Digital SD Card, Multimedia Memory Card (MMC), xD Memory Cards, Magic Gate USB Pen Drives, Flash Card, Smart Media, SONY Memory Stick, IBM Micro Drive, Multimedia Card, Secure Digital Card, Sandisk mini Cruzer, SanDisk Ultra II, Lexar JumpDrive Flash Memory, Dell USB Memory Key, Belkin Flash Drive USB2.0, Kingston DataTraveler Data Traveler USB 2.0 Flash Drives, HP USB Digital Drive, Verbatim Store n Go, Targus Go-Anywhere, SimpleTech Bonzai, Imation USB 2.0 Swivel Flash Drive, Iomega Micro Mini, FujiFilm USB 2.0 Drive, Kanguru KanguruMicro, Victorinox Swiss Knife Memory USB, Sony Mini Micro Vault Microvault, TEAC FLD USB Flash Drives, Tiny Disk, Hi Space, Fujifilm, Mushkin Flashkin, PNY Attache, Transcend Jetflash2a, Verbatim Store 'n' Go, Simpletech Bonzai Xpress, Pocki Drive, Capacity 16MB, 32MB, 64MB, 128MB,256MB, 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 3GB, 4GB, or any other data memory cards for digital cameras or digital photographs / photos / photo.

If you have unintentionally deleted or formatted pictures, videos or sound files on your data carrier or have pulled it out during a write operation, no matter - Apex Technology can reconstruct the lost data for nearly all cases. We can recover data when the computer complains that the "Disk is not formatted" or "the disk in drive E is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?". Of course you should choose "no" and give us a call! Alternatively your disk may not be recognised by the computer and it asks you "please insert a disk into drive". You know better, you know there is data there, but you think "how do I get my data back?" - we know how to get your data back.

We recover the following digital camera picture file formats
: .jpg, .tif, .bmp, .gif, Canon .crw , .vob dvd video, Fuji .raf , Olympus .orf (E-XX), Olympus .orf (C5050), Kodak .dcr, Minolta .mrw, Nikon .nef (D1H/D1X), Nikon .nef (E5000/E5700), Sigma - Foveon .x3f. Video files in .avi, QuickTime .mov format and audio files in .wav, .dss format can also be recovered.
Digital Camera manufacturers Sony, Panasonic, Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Minolta, Fuji, Olympus.

Apex Technology Specialists can recover your digital pictures after unintentional deletion, system error, accidental formatting the memory card, cyclic redundancy crc errors.

We rocover data from Optical Disk technologies including dual layer DVDs
DVD+R DVD-R DVDR DVDRW DVD RW DVD±RW DVDs mini DVD
CD-R CDR CDRW CD RW CD±RW CD's CDs mini CD
unreadable files, unrecognised discs corrupt movies and films. vob file recovery
These include Sony DCR DVD handycam, camcorder, professional video file repairs. SonyDCR DVD-91E DVD-100 DVD-101E DVD-200 DVD-201E DVD-301 DVD-301E camcorders, Panasonic VDRM50B, as well as for professional digital videos and video codecs such as Canopus. Hitachi Videocam Panasonic Camcorder. miniDVD's miniCD's with Disk Error message ( or Disc Error ). DVD Corruption, Corrupt Video file.

Typical disk Error messages
UNC Uncorrectable Data Error
Disc Access Error, Disk Access Error, Check disc error, Check disk
Disc not finalized, Disk not finalized, Disc not finalised, Disk not finalised
Disc Error, Disk Error, Disc Format Error, Disk Format Error, Rec. Disable, not correct disk, the disk in drive is not formatted do you want to format it now

We rocover data from Magnetic Disc technologies
3.25" inch Floppy disc, 5.25" Floppy disk IOMEGA 100MB 250MB ZIP disk 1GB 2GB Jaz Disc Ditto Tape Cartridge Apple MAC or PC

Data Recovery covers the following areas
Brighton, London, Manchester, Birmingham, Oxford, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, North West, West Midlands, Walsall, Wolverhampton, Stafford, Newcastle under Lyme, Stoke on Trent, Stone, Burton on Trent, Lichfield, Shrewsbury, Telford, Newport, Cannock, Rugeley, Uttoxeter, Keele, Trentham, Blythe Bridge, Cheadle, Barlaston, Festival Park, Hastings, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, Tamworth, Bedford, Cambridge, Northampton, Milton Keynes, Cambridgeshire, Peterborough, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Middlesex, Norfolk, Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Warwickshire, Atherstone, Stevenage, Luton, Hemel Hempstead, Glasgow, Scotland, Edinburgh, Fort William, Dundee, Perth, Stirling, Paisley, Dumfries, Elgin, Peterhead, Fraserburgh, Oban, Basildon, Romford, Chelmsford, Benfleet, Southampton, Edgbaston, Islington, Macclesfield, Bridgnorth, Bradford, Sheffield, Leeds, Yorkshire, Fife, Kircaldy, Suffolk, Thetford, Bury St.Edmunds, Ipswich, Newcastle upon Tyne, South Shields, Sunderland, Northumbria, Middlesborough, Hartlepool, Preston, Darlington, Rotherham, Penrith, Workington, Lancaster, Durham, Barrow in Furness, Gateshead, Carlisle, Teeside, Stockton on Tees, Erith, Kent, Ashford, Northhants, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, Bristol, Swindon, Bournemouth, Plymouth, Hastings, Maidstone, Southend on sea, Aberdeen, Inverness, Bridgnorth, Flakirk, Cardiff, Swansea, Chester, Liverpool, Blackpool, Aberystwyth, Wrexham, Carmarthen, Hull, Norwich, Gloucester, Bridgend, Torquay, Bath, Cantebury, Portsmouth, Exeter, AbuDhabi, Dubai, Sharajah, Belgium, New Zealand, Epsom, Surrey, Northern Ireland, Belfast, Dublin, Londonderry, Armagh, Cork, Eire

You have a problem we haven't listed? Email us now.
Email Enquiry@apextechnology.co.uk. This helps us to help you.
Thank you.

Apex Technology - Current Research Area

Data Recovery in UK

We are presently spending a lot of research time overcoming the 'Hard Drive not recognised in BIOS' particularly for the Fujitsu Hard drive. This an been largerly attributed to the Cirrus logic chip on the controller board for a faulty batch of the hard drive produced during 2002. MPG3 and MPF3 series are particularly affected.

The problems with this Hard Drive are currently expected to peak over 2004/2005 and so we would recommend having a good data backup procedure in place, or perhaps moving critical data to an alternative drive.