SG1 and SG2, Old Town to the centre · Stevenage
Data recovery in Stevenage. Britain's first New Town, and it builds spacecraft.
Stevenage was designated in 1946 as Britain's first New Town, and the 2021 census counted 89,495 people in the borough — Stevenage Borough Council's, with Hertfordshire County Council above it. The A1(M) passes to the west, with the town sitting east of junctions 7 and 8, while the A602 runs out to Hitchin one way and to Hertford and Ware the other. There are two high streets, not one: the Old Town street that came first, and the pedestrian centre built south of it. Airbus designs and builds spacecraft in the town, MBDA has held a testing and R&D site here since the 1950s, and the Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst campus says companies based there employ over 4,000 people. Underneath all of that sit the firms that actually ring us — machine shops, test houses, CAD contractors, lettings agencies, accountants — and what fails is a drive, a NAS or a server. Post it to our Oxford lab, tracked and insured, and the diagnosis when it arrives costs nothing.
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What fails in Stevenage.
No page for your town? Try the fault-finder →| The problem | Why we see it locally | First move |
|---|---|---|
| A machine shop's server that will not mount its array | One box holds the toolpaths and inspection records for parts already fitted | Disks out, numbered by bay, and all of them travel together |
| A test-rig capture drive that has stopped mounting | Scope and vibration runs get written straight to one external drive | Stop writing to it and post it in its own case |
| A four-bay NAS running a disk down since the spring | It keeps handing out the current drawing revision, so nobody chases it | Shut it down before the second goes |
| A site laptop asking for a BitLocker key nobody kept | Setting-out and progress photography live on encrypted site machines | Find the key in the Microsoft account before you pack it |
| A lab instrument PC that will not get past its own logo | Weeks of assay runs sit on it between exports to the notebook system | Leave it switched off; the drive travels bare or still in the machine |
Out of Stevenage, on to the bench.
A short way from Stevenage.
The places this lab covers →Four answers for Stevenage.
Is there a counter in Stevenage?
No, and there is no van or collection either. Work reaches the bench by post — tracked and insured on the way in, with the return leg paid by us. Anyone who would sooner hand a drive over can take it to the Oxford intake lab, open for drop-offs on weekdays, 9am–5:30pm. Almost every SG1 and SG2 job turns up as a parcel, and the free diagnosis happens on the day of arrival.
Which parts of Stevenage do you take work from?
All of SG1 and SG2 — Old Town at the north end, the purpose-built centre below it, and the villages strung along the A602 towards Hitchin one way and Hertford and Ware the other. Letchworth Garden City is the next town up. It all moves by post, so wherever in the borough you are, it is one tracked parcel and the same fixed price.
Can you read a test-rig drive that has stopped mounting?
That is a common parcel from a Stevenage test house. Capture drives take constant writes and no second copy, so the file table usually fails well before the measurements underneath it do. Stop writing to it, unplug it and send it in its own case — an external drive may travel inside its enclosure. We image it read-only first and read everything back off that copy.
Our only approved revision of a drawing set is on a NAS. What now?
Stop using it today. A box that is still serving files is still being written to, and the revision you need is the one most easily overwritten. A NAS can go whole or as bare disks, whichever suits you — a server or a RAID box is the other case, bare disks numbered by bay. Do not let it start rebuilding onto a replacement disk. We image every member and lift the drawings off the copies.
Other jobs from the casebook.
Power it down in Stevenage, then post it.
Power it down, tell us what went wrong, and let the free diagnosis land before you decide anything.