Your laptop will not turn on. Can you still get your files off it?

There is a particular kind of dread that comes with a laptop that will not switch on. Not the inconvenience of the machine, which is usually replaceable, but the growing suspicion that the photographs, the coursework, the accounts or the year of work on it have gone with it.

They usually have not. This is one of the few areas of this job where the honest answer is more hopeful than people expect, so it is worth explaining properly.

The drive is normally the survivor

Your files live on one component: the storage drive. In most modern laptops that is a small stick of a thing called an SSD, and in older machines a sealed metal box called a hard drive. Either way, it is a separate part from the things that usually kill a laptop.

When a laptop dies, the fault is nearly always somewhere else. The power circuitry, the charging port, the screen, the board that ties it all together. The drive sits out of the way, does very little of the work, and generates almost none of the heat. It tends to be a bystander.

And this is the part people do not expect: a drive does not need its laptop. It can be taken out and read on other equipment entirely, the same way a memory card does not need the camera it came from. So the machine being dead does not tell you anything much about whether your files are readable. Those are two different questions, and only one of them is usually bad news.

The one thing that can stop this working

Everything above assumes the drive can be read once it is out. Usually it can. There is one situation where it cannot, and it is worth knowing about before you get your hopes up.

Recent Windows laptops encrypt the drive on their own. If the machine was set up by signing in with a Microsoft account, Windows will very likely have switched device encryption on without announcing it, on Home as well as Pro. The key that unlocks the drive is tied to the machine, and part of it lives on the mainboard.

That matters here for an unhappy reason. If the mainboard is the thing that died, the drive comes out perfectly healthy and is still unreadable, because the piece that proves it belongs to that laptop went with the board.

The way out is the recovery key. Windows uploads it to the Microsoft account used to set the machine up, and you can fetch it from a phone at account.microsoft.com/devices/recoverykey. With that key the drive can be unlocked on other equipment and the files come back normally.

If the laptop was set up with a local account instead, encryption is usually not switched on and none of this applies.

So it is worth five minutes now, before anyone opens anything: find out whether that key exists. If it does, write it down. If nobody has it and the drive is encrypted, no engineer and no laboratory can get past it, and that is by design rather than a limitation of anyone’s equipment.

What actually makes recovery harder

A few things genuinely reduce the odds, and they are worth knowing because most of them are avoidable.

• Repeatedly trying to power it on. This is the big one. If there is liquid inside, or a fault on the board, every attempt risks doing fresh damage. It also never tells you anything that opening it up would not.
• Liquid that reached the drive itself. Uncommon, because of where liquid tends to travel, but not impossible.
• Physical damage to the drive, usually from a serious drop rather than a spill.
• Encryption without the key. If the drive was encrypted and nobody has the recovery key or the account it was tied to, the files are protected from us exactly as they are from anyone else. Worth checking whether you know the login for the account the laptop was set up with.
• A drive that was already failing before whatever finished the laptop off. If it had been making noises or losing files, that is a different job. Our guide on the warning signs of a failing drive covers those.

What it does not depend on

It does not depend on the laptop being repairable. It does not depend on the screen working, the keyboard working, or the machine ever switching on again. It does not depend on how long it has been dead, within reason, and a laptop that has been in a drawer for a year is a job we see often.

That last point matters if something happened a while ago and you have been putting it off. Time is unkind to a broken machine, but far less unkind to a drive sitting still inside it.

Getting the files back, and then deciding

The sensible order is files first, decision second.

Get your work and photographs off and safely onto something of yours. Then, knowing that nothing is at stake any more, decide calmly whether the laptop is worth repairing. It is a much better decision made in that order, and it removes the pressure that makes people spend money on machines they would not otherwise have kept. If you reach that stage, is it worth repairing my laptop walks through it.

Very often the recovery happens in a single visit, at your kitchen table, without the laptop going anywhere. The drive comes out, gets read, and your files go straight onto a stick or an external drive of yours. If you have one to hand when we arrive, that speeds things up.

What we do, and what it costs to find out

We come to you across Leeds and West Yorkshire. We look at what state the machine and the drive are really in at no charge, and tell you plainly what we think can be recovered and what cannot. You get one fixed price before we attempt anything, and if we cannot get your files back you do not pay for the attempt.

Some drives come back in full. Some come back in part. A few are genuinely gone, and you will hear that from us early rather than at the end of a long bill.

If the machine got wet, what to do after a spill covers that specifically, including where you stand if it happened months ago. If it simply stopped, the checks worth doing on a laptop that will not turn on is the place to start, because occasionally it is something simple and free.

And once your files are safe, the thing worth doing is making sure this can never cost you again. How to back up your files is the short version.