We don't outsource. Your drive stays in Austin.
Skip the middleman markup. Ship directly to the experts.
Ship To Address:
Rossmann Repair Group 2 Inc
2410 San Antonio St
Austin, TX 78705
Transit Times
FedEx Overnight: arrives the next business day
Mail-in data recovery at Rossmann Repair Group works in four steps.
This process eliminates The Local Trap, where local shops add a Middleman Tax of $300 to $1,000 by outsourcing your drive to a national lab. We are the lab. If we cannot recover your data, you pay nothing.
Mail-in data recovery at Rossmann Repair Group follows four steps: create a ticket, ship your drive to our Austin lab, receive a free evaluation and firm quote, then approve the recovery. No middlemen, no outsourcing. Your drive goes directly to the engineers who perform the work.
Fill out the online form with your device type, symptoms, and contact info. You get a ticket number by email within minutes. Write it on the outside of your box.
Free, takes 2 minutesAnti-static bag, bubble wrap, box-in-box. Ship to 2410 San Antonio St, Austin, TX 78705 using any carrier with tracking.
Your drive goes directly to our labOur engineers diagnose the failure using PC-3000 systems and send you a firm quote. No work begins without your written approval.
No diagnostic feesOnce approved, we recover your data and ship it back on a new external drive with full insurance and signature confirmation.
No data, no chargeFill this out before you ship. You will receive a ticket number via email immediately.
Write this Ticket Number clearly on the outside of your box.
You approve all costs before work begins. No surprise invoices. If we can't recover your data, you pay nothing.
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Open form in new tabMost local shops ship your drive to a 3rd party hub. We don't. Your drive never leaves our sight until we ship it back to you. See our full intake, tracking, and return process.
Use Box-in-Box packaging: wrap the drive in an anti-static bag, add 2-3 inches of bubble wrap, place it in a small inner box, then float that box inside a larger outer box with padding on all sides. This method absorbs impact without allowing the drive to shift.
Proper packaging is your first line of defense. A drive that has failed logically (software) can become a physical failure if dropped during shipping.
Warning: Do not use FedEx envelopes or padded mailers. They offer zero crush protection.
A clicking or non-spinning 3.5" HDD that arrives at our Austin lab is not powered on for repeated retry attempts on shipping day. It is photographed in its shipping box, logged to the ticket, imaged on the DeepSpar Disk Imager before any extended spin-up, and triaged in PC-3000 Portable III before any decision about a head swap is made. Every minute a degrading drive runs blind, it loses readable surface. The bench workflow below is sequenced specifically to protect platter media on the first pass.
Enterprise mail-in recovery at Rossmann includes NDA signing before intake, a chain-of-custody log per ticket, working-image deletion attestation on request, and insured FedEx Priority Overnight return shipping. Law firms running e-discovery, university researchers, and corporate IT teams recovering executive laptops can request all four handling requirements before shipping.
Law firms running e-discovery, university researchers handling large datasets, and enterprise IT teams recovering executive laptops have stricter handling requirements than a typical consumer recovery. The mail-in workflow below is what we run for those tickets.
Rossmann Repair Group accepts hard drives, SSDs, NVMe M.2 modules, USB flash drives, SD cards, iPhones, MacBooks, and RAID/NAS arrays for mail-in recovery. Each media type has different physical vulnerabilities during transit, different packaging requirements, and different failure mechanisms that determine recovery cost.
We accept hard drives, SSDs, NVMe M.2 modules, USB flash drives, SD cards, iPhones, MacBooks, & RAID/NAS arrays. Each media type has different physical vulnerabilities during transit.
HDDs are shock-sensitive even when powered off. A severe impact can dislodge the read/write heads onto the platter surface. Use dense, immobile padding; loose packing peanuts let the drive migrate to the box edge where shock absorption is zero. HDD recovery starts at From $100.
Solid-state drives don't have moving parts, so shock isn't the concern. Electrostatic discharge (ESD) is. A bare M.2 NVMe module or SATA SSD PCB must go inside an anti-static bag before any external padding. Don't wrap bare circuit boards directly in bubble wrap. SSD recovery starts at From $200.
Don't ship the entire NAS chassis unless we ask for it. Remove each drive, label the bay order clearly (Drive 1, Drive 2, etc.), & package them individually. Bay order is critical for RAID reconstruction without the original controller metadata.
Three failure conditions limit what any lab can recover: TRIM-erased NAND blocks on modern SSDs (data is physically gone), helium-sealed enterprise drives that require exact donor matching, and PCB swaps attempted without ROM chip transfer. Knowing these before shipping saves time and money.
We use PC-3000 Express, PC-3000 Portable III, PC-3000 SSD, & DeepSpar Disk Imager at our Austin lab. These are the same tools every serious recovery lab uses. But data recovery is governed by physics, not promises. Here's what that means for your device.
On the SSD side, the high-frequency mail-in cases are firmware failures on consumer NAND controllers. Phison PS3111-S11 SATA drives present the hardcoded SATAFIRM S11 identity string when their service area metadata corrupts beyond self-repair, and the drive reports an incorrect capacity to the host. Phison E12 NVMe drives (Sabrent Rocket NVMe, Inland Premium, MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro) fail differently: a corrupted E12 typically drops off the PCIe bus during NVMe initialization or enumerates with a generic ROM capacity in the 2 MB to 1 GB range.
In both cases we boot the drive into safe mode using PC-3000 SSD, inject a microcode loader into the controller SRAM, and emulate the translator in RAM to read the user area. Silicon Motion SM2258 and SM2259 drives (Crucial MX500, ADATA SU800) frequently enter a generic ROM mode and report 0 bytes capacity after a power event; the same translator emulation path applies. Marvell 88SS1074 firmware locks on the Crucial MX300 are also recoverable.
The hard ceiling is TRIM. If the OS issued TRIM/UNMAP for the files you want back and the controller already finished garbage collection, no firmware unlock recovers purged blocks.
MacBooks manufactured after 2018 have hardware-bound encryption. The NAND storage chips are cryptographically tied to the CPU on the logic board. Desoldering the chips & reading them in an external programmer won't work.
Recovery requires repairing the logic board at the component level to restore power rails & boot the Mac into DFU or Target Disk Mode. We perform this board-level micro-soldering in-house using Hakko FM-2032 irons & FLIR thermal cameras for fault isolation.
Mail-in data recovery pricing is identical whether you ship the drive or drop it off in Austin. Hard drive recovery starts at From $100. SATA SSD recovery starts at From $200. No diagnostic fees, no deposit on most tiers, and no payment until you approve the quote.
Tiers below cover mechanical hard drives and SATA SSDs. Helium-sealed enterprise drives, NVMe M.2 modules, USB flash drives, and SD cards are quoted on the corresponding service page.
Your drive works, you just need the data moved off it
Functional drive; data transfer to new media
Rush available: +$100
$100
3-5 business days
Your drive isn't recognized by your computer, but it's not making unusual sounds
File system corruption. Accessible with professional recovery software but not by the OS
Starting price; final depends on complexity
From $250
2-4 weeks
Your drive is completely inaccessible. It may be detected but shows the wrong size or won't respond
Firmware corruption: ROM, modules, or translator tables corrupted; requires PC-3000 terminal access
CMR drive: $600. SMR drive: $900.
$600–$900
3-6 weeks
Most Common
Your drive is clicking, beeping, or won't spin. The internal read/write heads have failed
Head stack assembly failure. Transplanting heads from a matching donor drive on a clean bench
50% deposit required. CMR: $1,200-$1,500 + donor. SMR: $1,500 + donor.
50% deposit required
$1,200–$1,500
4-8 weeks
Your drive was dropped, has visible damage, or a head crash scraped the platters
Platter scoring or contamination. Requires platter cleaning and head swap
50% deposit required. Donor parts are consumed in the repair. Most difficult recovery type.
50% deposit required
$2,000
4-8 weeks
Our "no data, no fee" policy applies to hardware recovery. We do not bill for unsuccessful physical repairs. If we replace a hard drive read/write head assembly or repair a liquid-damaged logic board to a bootable state, the hardware repair is complete and standard rates apply. If data remains inaccessible due to user-configured software locks, a forgotten passcode, or a remote wipe command, the physical repair is still billable. We cannot bypass user encryption or activation locks.
No data, no fee. Free evaluation and firm quote before any paid work. Full guarantee details. Head swap and surface damage require a 50% deposit because donor parts are consumed in the attempt.
Helium-sealed drives (8TB and larger NAS or server drives such as Toshiba MG08, Seagate Exos, and WD Ultrastar) are quoted on a separate tier. See helium drive pricing.
Low complexity
Your drive works, you just need the data moved off it
Functional drive; data transfer to new media
Rush available: +$100
$200
3-5 business days
Low complexity
Your drive isn't showing up, but it's not physically damaged
File system corruption. Visible to recovery software but not to OS
Starting price; final depends on complexity
From $250
2-4 weeks
Medium complexity
Your drive won't power on or has shorted components
PCB issues: failed voltage regulators, dead PMICs, shorted capacitors
May require a donor drive (additional cost)
$450–$600
3-6 weeks
Medium complexity
Most Common
Your drive is detected but shows the wrong name, wrong size, or no data
Firmware corruption: ROM, modules, or system files corrupted
Price depends on extent of bad areas in NAND
$600–$900
3-6 weeks
High complexity
Your drive's circuit board is severely damaged and requires NAND chip transplant to a donor PCB
NAND swap onto donor PCB. Precision microsoldering and BGA rework required
50% deposit required; donor drive cost additional
50% deposit required
$1,200–$1,500
4-8 weeks
Our "no data, no fee" policy applies to hardware recovery. We do not bill for unsuccessful physical repairs. If we replace a hard drive read/write head assembly or repair a liquid-damaged logic board to a bootable state, the hardware repair is complete and standard rates apply. If data remains inaccessible due to user-configured software locks, a forgotten passcode, or a remote wipe command, the physical repair is still billable. We cannot bypass user encryption or activation locks.
No data, no fee. Free evaluation and firm quote before any paid work. Full guarantee details. NAND swap requires a 50% deposit because donor parts are consumed in the attempt.
For NVMe M.2 modules see the SSD service page. For helium-sealed enterprise HDDs (Seagate Exos, WD Ultrastar, Toshiba MG) see the helium HDD recovery section on the hard drive recovery hub.
Shipping directly to Rossmann Repair Group cuts out the local shop middleman, which adds $300-$1,000 to your bill by outsourcing to a national lab. We are the lab. PC-3000 systems, 0.02 micron ULPA-filtered clean benches, and donor inventory are on-site in Austin. Your drive goes directly to the engineers performing the recovery.
The Local Trap: When you drop your drive off at a local computer repair shop, they often ship it to a national lab, adding a Middleman Tax of $300-$1,000 to your bill.
The Rossmann Way: We are the lab. We have the PC-3000 systems, the 0.02 micron ULPA-filtered clean benches, and the donor inventory on-site. Our professional hard drive data recovery services are performed entirely in-house. Learn more about why lab recovery beats remote recovery.
We use USPS Priority Mail / FedEx with signature confirmation. All completed recovery jobs are shipped back with full insurance covering the value of the recovery service.
Yes. Drives are shipped globally every day. The key is immobilization. If the drive cannot move inside the box, it is safe.
No. Our policy is No Data, No Charge. You owe us nothing for the attempt. You would only pay return shipping if you want the original device back.
Evaluation: 1-3 days. Recovery: 3-5 business days for simple copies, 4-8 weeks for head swaps (donor part dependent). A +$100 rush fee to move to the front of the queue is available to move to the front of the queue.
We recommend finding a local shop first. If you use us, you cover all shipping/customs costs both ways. We are not liable for international transit delays.
No. If your drive is clicking, beeping, or dropping offline, it has a hardware failure. Running CHKDSK or consumer recovery software forces failing read/write heads to drag across the platters, scoring the magnetic surface & turning a recoverable problem into permanent data loss. Keep the drive powered off & ship it to us.
Yes. Email your NDA, or our one-page mutual NDA, to help@rossmanngroup.com with the ticket number before the drive arrives. Common for law firms running e-discovery, university researchers handling large datasets, and corporate IT recovering CFO or general counsel laptops. We countersign and email the executed copy back; intake does not open the box until the executed PDF is on file.
Legacy labs price recovery as a percentage of data successfully retrieved. That model came from the mechanical-drive era, when partial file recovery was common. On modern hardware-bound encrypted devices, T2 and Apple Silicon MacBooks, iPhones, and NVMe SSDs with controller firmware locks, recovery is binary. Either we restore boot and the entire encrypted volume decrypts, or it does not. We charge a flat hardware-repair fee from the published pricing tiers. The percentage model does not match the physics of how these devices fail.
Never. Rebuilding a degraded RAID stresses the remaining aging drives, which can cause secondary failures. A forced rebuild with a damaged member can overwrite parity data with garbage, destroying the original file structures. Power off the NAS, label the bay order, & ship the individual drives.
Ship your drive in a rigid corrugated box using the box-in-box method: anti-static bag, two inches of bubble wrap on every face, inner box, outer carton. Carrier declared value covers physical hardware replacement only, not data. Include a note inside the box with your ticket number, name, and return address.
Use the box-in-box method. Place the bare drive in an anti-static (ESD) bag to protect the PCB from electrostatic discharge. Suspend the bagged drive in a small inner box with at least two inches of bubble wrap on every face, then float that inner box inside a larger outer carton with padding on all sides.
Do not use loose packing peanuts; they compress in transit and let the drive migrate to the box wall where shock absorption is zero. The same protocol applies to mechanical hard drive recovery shipments, where head parking and platter alignment are the first casualties of a drop.
No. Padded envelopes and flat-rate poly mailers have no crush protection on conveyor belts and stacked freight. A drive shipped in an envelope is highly likely to arrive with PCB cracks, head-slap damage, or a misaligned actuator.
Use a rigid corrugated cardboard outer box only. Western Digital's official RMA policy treats envelope shipping as customer-caused damage and voids warranty coverage. For SSD and NVMe recovery, the risk is ESD and pin damage on bare M.2 modules rather than head slap, but the envelope problem is identical.
No. Carrier declared value is a limited-liability cap, not true insurance, and it covers physical hardware replacement only. Default declared value is typically capped at $100 for FedEx and UPS unless you purchase additional coverage.
Every major carrier disclaims liability for the value of data, files, or intellectual property on the device. If you need transit coverage beyond the carrier liability cap, purchase third-party shipping insurance that explicitly covers inbound repair-and-return logistics before drop-off; standard carrier coverage does not protect data.
Inbound transit damage caused by inadequate packaging or carrier mishandling is the shipper's responsibility, not the lab's. That is why the two-inch bubble wrap rule and the box-in-box method matter; both exist to absorb impact shock so the drive arrives in the condition it left in.
New head-slap damage from a transit drop reduces the chance of a clean recovery and can convert a logical job into a clean-bench job. Document the packaging on your end (photos) before sealing the box and keep the inbound tracking record, then see our full intake and recovery process for what happens after the carrier scan.
Seal each drive in its own anti-static bag, wrap it individually in bubble wrap, and label it with its original bay position (Drive 1, Drive 2, Drive 3, and so on). Bare drives must never contact each other inside the box; the heavy metal chassis of one drive can crack the PCB or board components of another during a drop event.
Bay order is critical for RAID reconstruction without the original controller metadata. Power the NAS off first; do not rebuild a degraded array before shipping.
Include a printed note or service slip with your full name, ticket number, phone number, email address, return address, and a brief description of the failure symptoms (clicking, beeping, not detected, dropped, water exposure, and so on). Exterior shipping labels can be torn off by sorting equipment, so the interior note is what guarantees we can match your drive to your ticket on intake.
Our no-fix-no-fee guarantee is keyed to the ticket number you write on both the outside of the box and the inside note.
Use HS code 8471.70 (Storage units) for hard drives, SSDs, and NVMe modules on the international commercial invoice and CN22 or CN23 customs declaration. Declare only the physical hardware replacement value of the failed device, not the value of the data on it; declaring data value triggers incorrect import tariffs at the destination and at re-entry into the United States.
Mark the parcel as Repair and Return when the carrier offers that option to keep customs duties on the return leg minimal. International customers cover all shipping and customs costs both ways.
Keep AC adapters, USB cables, mounting brackets, and retail boxes at home unless we specifically ask for them. The lab uses standardized bench power supplies and SATA, NVMe, and USB bridges that are matched to the drive on intake.
For external drives where the bridge board is potentially the failure point (WD My Passport, Seagate Backup Plus, LaCie portables), ship the original enclosure with the drive inside so we can test the bridge against the bare drive. For internal drives, ship the bare drive only.
Power the laptop down completely (full shutdown, not Sleep or Hibernate) so it cannot wake and overheat inside a sealed box. Lithium-ion batteries installed in equipment ship under UN3481 packing instructions; FedEx, UPS, and USPS Ground all accept these shipments when the carrier's lithium-battery section of the air waybill is filled out.
If you are mailing a MacBook with a swollen or punctured battery, declare it at the counter and do not ship it as a normal parcel. The same logic applies to iPhone shipments for iPhone board-level data recovery; swollen lithium-polymer batteries get declared, undamaged units ship normally.
Intake confirmation goes out by email within one business day of the carrier delivery scan, and the drive is logged to your ticket number and moved to the secured engineer area on the same day in most cases.
If you have not received a confirmation email within two business days of the delivery scan, check your spam folder first, then reply to the original ticket email so we can match the package to your ticket. Initial physical evaluation typically starts inside one to three business days of intake.
Inter-carrier hand-offs are not a defined service. A FedEx parcel dropped in a USPS blue box will usually be held at the local post office for weeks, returned to sender for postage due, or in some cases delivered late through an informal regional handoff.
Always hand the parcel to the carrier whose label is on the box. If you printed a FedEx label, drop it at a FedEx Office, Walgreens FedEx counter, or staffed FedEx Ship Center. If you printed a USPS label, hand it to the counter at a Post Office rather than leaving it in a collection box for a large or heavy parcel.
Recovered files go back to you on new external media, never on the original failed drive. The original drive is either returned with the recovery media or kept at the lab for secure destruction, whichever you select on the ticket.
Donor parts consumed during a head swap (read or write head stack, sometimes platters) are not returned because they are physically transplanted into the patient drive. We image first using PC-3000 imaging tools so the recovery work lives in a working image rather than back on the failing original.
No matter where you are in the United States, you can ship your drive to our Austin lab. Here are city-specific guides for some of the areas we serve.
Our Austin lab operates on a transparency-first model. We use industry-standard recovery tools, including PC-3000 and DeepSpar, combined with strict environmental controls to make sure your hard drive is handled safely and properly. This approach allows us to serve clients nationwide with consistent technical standards.
Open-drive work is performed in a ULPA-filtered laminar-flow bench, validated to 0.02 µm particle count, verified using TSI P-Trak instrumentation.
Serving clients nationwide via mail-in service since 2008. Our lead engineer holds PC-3000 and HEX Akademia certifications for hard drive firmware repair and mechanical recovery.
Our repair work has been covered by The Wall Street Journal and Business Insider, with CBC News reporting on our pricing transparency. Louis Rossmann has testified in Right to Repair hearings in multiple states and founded the Repair Preservation Group.
Our "No Data, No Charge" policy means we assume the risk of the recovery attempt, not the client.
Louis Rossmann
Louis Rossmann's well trained staff review our lab protocols to ensure technical accuracy and honest service. Since 2008, his focus has been on clear technical communication and accurate diagnostics rather than sales-driven explanations.
We believe in proving standards rather than just stating them. We use TSI P-Trak instrumentation to verify that clean-air benchmarks are met before any drive is opened.
See our clean bench validation data and particle test videoRelated services
Full HDD recovery service overview
SSD firmware and controller recovery
WD Passport, Seagate Backup Plus, LaCie portables
How to safely pack your drive
What happens when we receive your drive
Five published pricing tiers
Our guarantee policy
Single Austin lab. Component-level engineers. No data, no recovery fee.
“Sent my hdd for data recovery, process was simple and I was able to pre-authorize an amount. They worked on my drive within 2 days of receiving it and the total cost was literally 1/10th of the amount of another service I got a quote from. Professional, quick, affordable. Nothing to complain about.”
Andrew Hansen
“My satisfaction with Rossmann Repair Group goes beyond just 5 stars. I had a hard drive die some time ago, but I had no idea where I could send it knowing it would be safe, or there being a chance I'd be ripped off.”
Kyle Hartley (crazybangles)
“Walked in with my wife's dead hard drive, walked out 20 minutes later with it fixed. They were friendly, professional, did the work in a snap, and saved me the hefty repair prices for other (mail in) hard drive recovery services!”
Patrick Dughi
“USE THIS COMPANY!!!! You will not regret it. Extremely professional and transparent about everything, including cost. I sent my hard drive out for repair with another company that quoted me $1500. for a simple recovery. Rossman did better, faster, and significantly more accurately priced ($1300 less!). I loved everything about the interactions I had with their employees.”
Melissa Hazlett
