Dead laptop data recovery: the drive is usually fine.

Two different faults get called a dead laptop. In the first, the machine is the problem: no lights, no fan, or it powers on and stops at the maker's logo. The drive has not been asked to do anything unusual. Your files sit on it exactly as they were, and the job is to read that drive somewhere else. In the second, the drive is the problem. It clicks, grinds, beeps, takes minutes to appear, or Windows reports errors while it loads. Every power-on runs a damaged drive against its own platters and costs readable data. Power it off and leave it off.

Do not run startup repair, reinstall Windows, reset the Mac, or accept a format prompt on a machine whose files you need. Those tools fix the operating system by writing to the drive. They do not preserve what was on it. If the laptop uses BitLocker or FileVault, keep the whole machine together, charger included. The drive holds encrypted blocks, and the key that unlocks them is your password, a recovery key saved to your Microsoft or Apple account, or a security chip on the laptop board. With the key, an encrypted drive images and recovers like any other. Where keys are missing, money does not decrypt the media. You hear that at assessment, before any quote.

We take the drive out of the laptop and image it read-only on a write blocker. The laptop is not powered again. On a healthy drive that is a straight copy, and the recovery runs from the copy. On a degraded drive the imager reads the good areas first, skips the bad ones and returns to them last, so the files you need are off before the weakest region is touched. This is the same work as our hard drive recovery for 2.5-inch disks and SSD and NVMe recovery for M.2 and SATA SSDs.

There is a genuine free first step, if you are comfortable with a screwdriver. On most laptops the drive is a 2.5-inch SATA disk or an M.2 stick behind a panel. Remove it, connect it to another computer through a USB adapter or enclosure, and copy your files to a second drive. If the drive reads cleanly, you are done and you owe nobody anything. Stop the moment it is slow, disappears, or shows errors. A drive that will not copy cleanly is failing, and each retry costs data. That is the point to power off and start a case.

Thin laptops from the last few years, and every Apple Silicon Mac, solder the storage to the main board. There is no drive to remove. Those machines are assessed as a whole, and the answer depends on whether the board can be brought up far enough to read the storage. Macs go through our Mac data recovery page.

We do not run a cleanroom. Mechanical failures (clicking, non-spinning, head crash) are referred after free assessment. We will not open the drive on a bench and make it worse.

What you see	What it usually means	Files at risk?
No lights, no fan, no charge light	Charger, power circuit or main board. The drive was never asked to spin.	Rarely. Read the drive on another machine.
Powers on, shows the logo, then stops	Operating system or boot files. The drive is usually readable.	Rarely, unless it has been repaired or reinstalled since.
Spins up, then a blue screen or a boot loop	Corrupt system files, or bad sectors under the operating system.	Sometimes. Each retry reads the same damaged area.
Clicking, grinding, beeping, or minutes to appear	The drive itself. Heads, motor or media are failing.	Yes. Power off now. Every start costs data.