Overview
A regular customer in Wandsworth brought in a Compaq Presario with a failed hard drive and urgent need to recover business files.
Symptoms
- Drive not booting or mounting reliably
- Loss of access to stored documents
- System could not be used for normal work
Diagnosis
The internal HDD had failed. We first assessed recoverability before replacing hardware so the customer had the best chance of retrieving critical files.
Fix
We recovered around half of the stored data, installed a new 500GB SATA hard drive, reinstalled Windows, and reconfigured Outlook and key business software.
Result
The customer left with a working laptop, a clean system build, and partial data successfully recovered.
Prevention / Tips
Keep automated backups for email and business files so hardware failures do not become data-loss emergencies.