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Mail-in from Rockford, IL

Rockford Hard Drive Data Recovery

Rossmann Repair Group has one lab, at 2410 San Antonio Street in Austin, Texas. We have no office, drop-off point or technician in Rockford or anywhere else in Illinois. A customer in Rockford ships the failed drive to Austin, and the technician who owns the tools does the work there. Why a one-lab company publishes state and city pages is answered in Louis Rossmann’s own words on our mail-in page.

You pay to ship the drive to us and we bill you for return shipping. Pricing is published before you ship, the evaluation is free, and if we recover no data there is no recovery fee. How to check whether a data recovery company’s local address is a real lab is on our page on fake data recovery locations, and how the mail-in process works is on our mail-in page.

Where the work happens

Recovery steps for a failed hard drive

A drive that arrives from Rockford is imaged first, on the DeepSpar Disk Imager, with the drive’s background firmware processes disabled and bad-sector auto-relocation turned off, so the drive is not writing to its own service area while its data is being read. Firmware and service-area faults are worked on the PC-3000 Express, PC-3000 Portable III and PC-3000 Portable PRO. Head and platter work is done under a 0.02 micron ULPA-filtered clean bench, and helium drives are refilled in-house after a head swap. Donor parts come from the lab’s own stock, matched to the failed drive.

The service pages describe each of these in detail: hard drive data recovery, SSD data recovery, RAID data recovery and NAS data recovery. All of it is performed in Austin, whatever city the drive came from.

Pricing

Published hard drive recovery pricing

These are the tiers a Rockford customer is quoted from. +$100 rush fee to move to the front of the queue. Donor drives are matching drives used for parts. Typical donor cost: $50–$150 for common drives, $200–$400 for rare or high-capacity models. We source the cheapest compatible donor available.

Hard drive recovery tiers

Simple Copy
Your drive works, you just need the data moved off it
$100
File System Recovery
Your drive isn't recognized by your computer, but it's not making unusual sounds
From $250
Firmware Repair
Your drive is completely inaccessible. It may be detected but shows the wrong size or won't respond
$600–$900
Head Swap
Bench diagnosis found the read/write heads have to be replaced. Clicking can also come from firmware, the preamp, or the spindle
$1,200–$1,500
Surface / Platter Damage
Your drive was dropped, has visible damage, or a head crash scraped the platters
$2,000

Other media, starting prices

Helium hard drive recovery
From $200
SATA SSD recovery
From $200
NVMe SSD recovery
From $200
USB flash and memory card recovery
From $200
How it works

Mail-in process from Rockford

  1. 1

    Contact the lab

    Call or use the contact form. We tell you what to send and how to pack it before anything ships.

    No diagnostic fee
  2. 2

    Ship the drive to Austin

    Pack the drive as the carrier's own guidance below describes and ship it to 2410 San Antonio Street, Austin, TX 78705. You pay the carrier for that leg.

    One lab, one address
  3. 3

    Free evaluation and a quote

    The technician evaluates the drive and quotes the tier it falls in. The tiers are the published ones on this page.

    Published pricing
  4. 4

    Recovery and return

    With your approval the recovery is performed in the Austin lab and the data ships back on a new drive. If no data is recovered there is no recovery fee. Return shipping is billed to you.

    No data, no recovery fee
Lab versus repair shop

Why a data recovery lab and not a general repair shop?

A failed hard drive needs an imager that stops on a bad read within milliseconds and reads around it, a clean bench for any head or platter work, firmware and service-area tools for the drive’s own controller, and a supply of donor parts. A general repair shop’s usual tools work against the drive you still have.

Recovery software is useless once a drive is undetected by the computer, clicking, or spinning down, because those are hardware and firmware failures that stop the operating system from ever seeing the device. A software imager run on a clicking drive grinds the heads into the platters and destroys the data; a mechanical failure has to be stabilized in a clean bench first. Running CHKDSK on a mechanically failing drive forces endless read retries that exhaust weak heads and physically score the platters. Bad-sector repair tools cannot repair a platter; they only force the drive to remap data to spare sectors, which stresses already-degraded heads.

We are not the only lab that works this way, and we say so: honest data recovery companies lists others we recommend. For the difference between software and a lab, read data recovery software versus professional service, and for how to judge any lab, read how to pick a data recovery service.

Shipping

Shipping a drive from Rockford to Austin

FedEx says FedEx Ground delivery within the contiguous U.S. takes 1 to 5 business days. It also says the first $100 of value in a shipment is included in the shipping rate as its standard declared-value limit of liability, and that declared value is not shipping insurance. USPS says its delivery times are not guaranteed. Neither publishes a day count from Rockford to Austin on a static page; each carrier’s own rate tool gives one for your ZIP code.

You pay the carrier to send the drive to the lab, and we bill you for return shipping. Pack it the way FedEx’s own guidance for shipping a hard drive describes:

1

Wrap the drive on all sides with 3 to 4 inches of bubble packaging and secure the wrap with packing tape.

2

Put the wrapped drive in a plastic bag so packing peanuts cannot get inside it, then set it in the center of a box with at least 2 inches of peanuts under it.

3

Fill every gap so there are at least 2 inches of peanuts on all six sides, then seal the top and bottom with three strips of packing tape at least 2 inches wide.

4

Put that box inside a second, outer box fitted with foam corner cushions so the inner box cannot shift in transit.

5

Close the outer box with the H taping method: at least three strips of tape at least 2 inches wide across the top, the bottom, and every seam and flap.

More of the state

Other cities in Illinois

Every Illinois page describes the same mail-in route to the same Austin lab.

Hub

Every state we ship from

The locations hub lists every state page and the cities under each.

All states

Ship a failed drive from Rockford to Austin

Free evaluation, published pricing, no data no fee. You pay to ship to the lab; return shipping is billed.

(512) 212-9111Mon-Fri 10am-6pm CT
No diagnostic fee
No data, no fee
4.9 stars, 1,837+ reviews