A grey screen going nowhere. A blinking question mark folder. A start-up chime and then silence. An iMac behaving that way is nearly always still holding a complete photo library and a full set of paperwork. What gets recovered is the removable storage: one plain SATA disk, or both halves of a Fusion pair.
Every apple imac job is diagnosed free. The fixed figure reaches you in writing first, before any tools come out.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
First job on any apple imac is matching the symptom to the fault. Twenty-odd years in, these twenty-five cover nearly every one that reaches this bench.
No bootable system was found. That points at one of two things, a failed disk or a broken file system, and we recover both. The icon distinguishes neither, and nobody can do it down a phone line.
macOS sets off and never gets where it was going, normally across a disk now reading at walking pace. Image it before the walk turns into a full stop, because that is where this is heading.
SSD and hard disk drift out of step and the volume spanning them dissolves. Each half is captured by itself. Once both copies exist, the partnership gets reassembled in software and the volume stands up again.
Behind the glued glass of a big-screen Mac of a certain vintage sits a plain 3.5-inch disk, failing in the plainest way there is. We take it out, image it, and return your data on fresh media.
Installation halted in mid-air and the machine has circled the airfield ever since. Beneath all that, the user folders sit exactly as they stood the moment before it started.
Apple's file systems break in their own particular fashion, and general-purpose tools mistranslate the result. We parse them natively. That is what separates a named folder tree from a pile of anonymous fragments.
One misread click inside Recovery does it. Recovery remains possible while nothing further writes to that volume, so the machine goes off at that moment and stays off. No exception is worth making.
Fitted throughout those model years, failing young ever since, and arriving here regularly to this day. Donors for them became a permanent fixture on the rack rather than something ordered in when needed.
Power supply and logic board both retire in one event while the removable disk behind them is untouched. Apple can mourn the board. The disk is the part that matters to you.
Give us the credentials and an encrypted APFS container opens, then rebuilds like anything else. Note the password down somewhere and send that in with the disk. Lacking one, the answer is short and nobody enjoys hearing it.
An iMac reduced to a crawl is a disk expiring in instalments. Capture it while it still answers at all. That window closes, and it gives no notice before doing so.
Kitchen-table surgery snags the SATA and power leads far sooner than it harms anything that matters. The disk usually survives its rescue in good order, whatever condition the front of the machine finishes in.
If a sick volume refuses to show up even in that mode, exactly one safe route is left. Remove the disk and image it. Every alternative on offer gambles with the only copy you have.
Slim machines from 2013 onwards carry laptop-class disks that sit at temperature for years and age into bad sectors. Hardware imaging answers that. Waiting does not, because waiting is how it got here.
Lose power mid-write and the file system journal ends up in shreds, with the volume refusing to mount. It gets rebuilt calmly from a complete image, not by pointing repair tools at a sick disk.
Certain 3TB Seagates went into 2012 and 2013 machines carrying a known defect, and a great many owners never noticed the replacement window. By now it is a thoroughly rehearsed job on this bench.
Damp rooms and salt in the air fur the SSD's edge contacts. Offline now and then to begin with, then offline for good. Cleaned, re-seated on our own adapters, imaged.
An APFS volume with nothing free will neither start up nor mend itself, and the snapshots holding that space refuse to go quietly. Image everything, then untangle it on the copy with no clock running.
Fusion pre-dating APFS runs over Core Storage. That metadata tears in ways Apple's disk utility will not even acknowledge. Stitching it back together is hand work, using both halves.
Phone goes missing, remote wipe gets fired in a panic, and the iMac is erased alongside it. Survival depends on whether FileVault was running. You get that verdict immediately rather than in instalments.
Upgrade an older machine and the volume converts where it lies. Interrupt that with a power cut, or with a failing sector, and one disk ends up described two different ways at once. Nothing mounts. Disk utilities deepen the hole. We read both structures off an image and follow the newer one as far as it will take us.
Apple ran a dedicated thermal sensor cable to the internal disk across several generations. Fray that cable and the fans run flat out while the machine behaves as though the disk is dying. The disk is in perfect health. Rule it out before anybody replaces anything.
New Mac set up, transfer looked complete, old machine wiped and sold on. A folder then turns out to be missing. Whatever remains sits on the old disk underneath the erase, and how much comes back depends on how little has been written since.
Set iCloud Photos to optimise storage and the full-resolution originals live in the cloud while the Mac keeps small previews. Lose the account, or have the library taken out of it, and the local disk holds low-resolution copies and nothing else. We recover what is genuinely there and state clearly what is not.
An engineer swapped the hard disk, never refitted the SSD, and never rebuilt the logical volume afterwards. What is left reads as blank to every tool that examines it, while still holding the bulk of the data. Putting the pair back together in software is the fix.
The disk in an iMac sits behind a display glued to the chassis. Reaching it needs a steady hand and a plastic cutting tool, and that stage is yours rather than ours, because machines are not opened up at this end. Ring and it will be described to you, or hand it to any Apple repair shop and they will do it without ceremony. Once the drive arrives, the work is ordinary. HFS+ and APFS read natively. An Apple disk that clicks joins everything else on the clean bench. A Fusion Drive gets treated as the odd construction it is: a small SSD and a large hard disk shown to macOS as one volume, which sounds tidy right up to the point where half of it fails and takes the other half with it. Each device is imaged on its own. The pairing gets rebuilt in software. Files are read out of that reconstruction and never off anything of yours.
One question decides it. Does the storage unplug. An iMac from 2009 through 2011, holding a 3.5-inch SATA disk: yes, and plenty are still earning their keep. A Fusion-era machine with a blade beside a hard disk: yes again, and one of the more common Apple jobs here. T2-secured Intel iMacs, and anything running on Apple Silicon: no. On those the SSD belongs to the logic board, soldered down under hardware encryption, which welds your data to one specific board. Soldered Apple work was dropped from the service list about two years back, once it was clear that too few attempts succeeded to bill anyone for in good conscience. A single phone call establishes which model year you are holding, and it is the cheapest diagnostic going.
From the first adapter through to the finished copy, iMac work stays Apple-native at every step:
Halves captured independently, joined again in software, and whichever volume sat above them, APFS or HFS+, turned back into named files and folders.
Blades, Fusion pairs and plain SATA units each connect natively into the imaging stack. Nothing in this process relies on improvisation.
Mechanical failure in an iMac follows the identical donor-head and firmware route every other spinning disk here follows. Physics pays no attention to the badge on the case.
Native parsing for both file systems, and Fusion logical-volume reassembly counts as ordinary work here rather than a chargeable extra.
Encrypted volumes on removable disks open using whatever password you supply and come back as plain readable folders. Where there is no password, we say so at the diagnostic stage.
Lose a volume to one slip inside Disk Utility, or to an update that gave up partway, and carving returns it, on a single condition: its freed space must have stayed unwritten.
One question decides everything on this page. Does the storage come out? On SATA units and Fusion pairs, yes. The most reliable casualty of that era remains the short-lived 1TB Seagates fitted through 2009 to 2011, and donors for them stay racked permanently. T2 and Apple Silicon bond an encrypted SSD into the logic board, so we retired that work instead of dressing it up in odds no honest engineer could quote. Unsure which machine is on your desk? Ring and describe it. Diagnosis is free and completes two working days after the drive lands here, but this particular question usually gets settled before anything is posted.
Nearly everything on this bench came by tracked, insured post. It is the safest way to shift a failing drive, and a parcel handed in at a North-East post office is usually here the next working day.
Still bolted into a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR box? Get the hard drive or SSD out first. The bare drive travels on its own. Stripping machines down is not a job this lab takes on. Flash soldered to a motherboard, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a couple of very thin laptops, is our one flat no: if it will not unbolt, it cannot be worked on.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it for the attention of Edinburgh Data Recovery. From Aberdeen that is roughly 130 miles and two and a half hours down the A90, or next working day by tracked post if you would rather not make the run. You get a call the moment it is booked onto the bench.
Not sure what belongs in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or work through the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, one number written down, no fix no fee on the bulk of jobs. Start online or phone it in.