A grey screen. Not moving anywhere. A folder with a blinking question mark. A start-up chime and nothing else. When an iMac behaves like this it almost always still has a full library of photos and a complete set of paperwork. The recoverable part is the removable storage; either one plain SATA disk or the two sides of a Fusion pair.
Every Apple iMac job is diagnosed free. You get a fixed price in writing first, before we even use any tools.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. The exceptions are electronic/mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and forensic jobs. All pricing information can be found on the data recovery cost page.
First job on every Apple iMac is matching the symptom to the fault. We have been working for over twenty years and these twenty-five cover almost all of them that come to this bench.
The Mac could not find a bootable system. That points at either one of two things, a bad disk or a broken filesystem, and we can recover both. The icon doesn't distinguish between the two, and nobody can do it by phone.
macOS starts out and never gets where it was going, typically across a hard drive which is now reading data at walking pace. Image it before the walk stops being a walk and becomes a complete stop, because that's exactly where this is headed.
An SSD and hard disk drift out of step with each other and the volume spanning both dissolves. We capture each half separately from each other. Once we have a copy of both halves we reassemble the partnership in software and the volume stands back up again.
Behind the glued glass of a big screen Mac of a certain age lies a simple 3.5-inch disk, failing in the most basic way possible. You take it out; we image it and return your data on fresh media.
Installation stopped in mid-air and the machine has been circling the airfield ever since. Underneath that, however, your user folders are still as they were when installation began.
The way Apple's filesystems fail is unique; most generic utilities cannot properly translate the result. We read them natively. It is what makes a named folder hierarchy different from a random assortment of anonymous pieces.
A single misread click inside Recovery can cause this to occur. Recovery remains possible as long as nothing further is written to that volume, so the computer is shut down at that moment and stays shut down. No exceptions should be made for this problem.
They were fitted throughout those model years, have failed young ever since and are still consistently showing up here to this day. Therefore, instead of ordering them in as they would be needed, donors for these became a constant presence on the shelf.
Both the power supply and logic board go out at once but leave behind the removable disk, which is unscathed. Apple may lament the loss of the board; the disk is the part that matters to you.
Provide us the credentials and an encrypted APFS container opens, then rebuilds like anything else. Write the password down somewhere and include it with the disk. If you do not have a password, the answer is short, and nobody likes hearing it.
The slow performance of an iMac is a disk failing bit by bit. Image it as soon as possible while it is still working. The opportunity will close, and there will be no warning of when it will happen.
Surgery performed on a kitchen table causes damage to the SATA and power connections much faster than it causes any significant problems with the drive itself. In most cases, the disk survives its rescue in good order, whatever condition the front of the machine ends up in.
When a sick disk will not show up even in that mode, there is only one risk-free option available. Remove the disk and image it. All of the alternatives available are risking damaging the last copy you have of the data.
The slim iMacs manufactured from 2013 onwards contain a hard drive (laptop class) which sits at high temperatures for extended periods of time and develops bad sectors. Imaging hardware solves that problem. Waiting does not solve that problem because waiting is how you got here.
A loss of power during a write operation causes the file system's journal to become damaged, resulting in a refusal to mount a volume. A complete image can be used to rebuild the file system without causing any further harm to a sick disk.
There were several models of 3TB Seagate disks built into Macs manufactured in 2012 and 2013 with a known defect. Many users did not know they had a replacement window for their disks. This has been extensively practised on this bench.
The dampness of a room and the presence of salt in the air have damaged the SSD's edge contact areas. The drive was initially intermittently unavailable, but eventually went completely offline. We cleaned and re-seated the drives on our own adapters, then imaged them.
When an APFS volume is full (with little or no free space) you are unable to boot from it, and it will not mend itself either. Additionally, the snapshots holding that space may refuse to be deleted. We image everything first, then untangle it on the copy with no clock running.
All versions of Fusion prior to APFS are implemented via Core Storage. Therefore, when that Core Storage metadata tears, Disk Utility will not even acknowledge it. It can only be repaired manually using the two separate parts of your original drive.
You lose your phone. In a hurry you remotely wipe it, and at the same time your iMac loses everything with it. Whether your data survives depends on whether FileVault was turned on. Either way, you know right away as opposed to having to wait for each part of the story to develop.
An old system is upgraded and then the volume structure converts in place. If that is interrupted by either a power failure or a bad sector, the disk ends up being defined by two different structures at the same time. The volumes cannot be mounted. Utilities for disks just make things worse. We extract both structures from a copy of the disk and continue to follow the later structure as far as it will take us.
For many years Apple supplied each internal hard drive with a custom-made thermal sensing wire directly connected to the internal disk. When this wire breaks down (frays), the fans run continuously at full speed, but the disk appears to be failing. The disk is perfectly fine. Check for frayed wires before you replace anything.
The new Mac had an initial setup done, the file transfer seemed complete, and the old machine got completely wiped clean and resold. But one day while digging through files, you realised that a folder was missing. Everything left after the erasure exists on the old disk underneath the erase; what comes back depends upon how little has been written to it since.
iCloud Photos will allow you to optimise for your device's storage and keep the original resolution images stored in iCloud (in the cloud) with a preview image stored on your Mac. When you lose the account, or the library is taken completely out of the account, then the preview images remain on the hard drive but that is all. We recover what is really there and make it very clear what is not.
An engineer simply replaced the hard drive, did not refit the SSD, and did not rebuild the logical volume. As a result everything appears empty to all tools attempting to read from it, but the majority of the data is still on there. Rebuilding the pair in software will restore operation with the two in sync.
The disk in your iMac is behind a screen that has been glued to the chassis of the computer. Getting to the disk requires patience and care with a plastic cutting tool. You do this rather than us because machines are not opened up at our end. Call us and the process will be described to you, or if you would like, you can take the iMac to any Apple repair shop for them to open it. Once we have received the disk from you, what happens next is standard fare. HFS+ and APFS are read natively. Any Apple disk that clicks gets added to the rest on our bench. A Fusion Drive is special because it appears to macOS as one single volume made up of a small SSD and a larger hard disk. It seems like a nice setup until the time when half of it fails, taking the rest with it. Each drive is separately imaged, and the configuration (pairing) is created again in software. Your files are then copied off that creation and never off your drives.
One question decides everything: will the storage unplug? An older iMac from 2009 through 2011 using a 3.5-inch SATA disk will most definitely allow for an unplugged storage unit, and there are many of these older units that continue to earn their keep. Fusion-era iMacs utilising a blade beside a hard drive also allow for an unplugged storage unit, and this is one of the more common Apple jobs here. T2-secured Intel iMacs and anything utilising Apple Silicon will not. In both cases the SSD is part of the logic board and is soldered onto it, under hardware-based encryption that binds your data to one specific board. Once it was clear that there were too few successful attempts to bill anyone for in good conscience, we removed soldered Apple work from our service list approximately two years ago. A single phone call establishes which model year you are holding, and it is the cheapest diagnostic going.
From the initial adapter through to the finished copy, our iMac work remains totally native to Apple at every step:
Each half was imaged separately and merged back together in software. Regardless of what file system existed above them (APFS or HFS+), each was restored back into named folders and files.
Blades, Fusion pairs and standard SATA units can each be connected natively into the imaging stack. No improvisational processes exist within our imaging stack.
Failure of mechanical components in an iMac will follow the same donor-head and firmware path as any other spinning disk here. In essence, physics does not care about the badge on your device.
Both APFS and HFS+ file systems will have native parsers available. Reassembling a logical volume created by Fusion will also be treated as normal work (not a chargeable extra).
Encryption on removable media devices will be opened via supplied password(s). The contents of encrypted volumes will be displayed as plain readable folder structures. If no password exists for a given volume, we will indicate this during the diagnostic phase.
Lose a volume to a single slip in Disk Utility, or as the result of an update that failed partway, and carving can recover the data, with just one requirement: the freed space has to have stayed blank (unwritten).
One question determines all of what you will find on this page. Does the storage come out? Yes, for SATA units and the Fusion pair models. The most reliable casualty of that time is the short-lived 1TB Seagate fitted through 2009 to 2011, and donors for them stay in stock permanently. T2 and Apple Silicon bond an encrypted SSD into the logic board, so we discontinued that work rather than dressing it up in odds that no honest engineer would ever be able to quote. Not sure which machine is sitting on your desk? Call us and tell us about it. Diagnosis is free and takes two working days after receipt of the drive, but this particular question usually gets settled prior to anything being posted.
Get a quote first by telephone or use our free online diagnostic. Most of what you see on this bench will then be delivered via tracked, insured post. This is one of the safest ways to move a failing drive and packages handed in at a North-East post office are normally delivered here the next working day.
Still attached to a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV/DVR unit? Remove the hard drive or SSD first. The bare drive travels on its own; when removing disks from a server remove all the disks and label each disk by its bay. This lab does not take machines apart. Any storage that has been soldered onto a motherboard (as in T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and a couple of thin laptops) will not be worked on: if it will not unbolt, we cannot work on it. If you're not sure what type of machine you have, ring us first. Phones and tablets are also not taken on.
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Your parcel should be addressed to Edinburgh Data Recovery, approximately two and a half hours (and 130 miles) from Aberdeen via the A90; alternatively it can reach us the next working day by tracked post if this journey time / distance is prohibitive to travel. As soon as your drive has been scheduled in we will contact you.
Still unsure about what should be placed inside of the packaging? Please call us first on 0800 689 0668, or use our free online diagnostic tool to assist you in deciding which items belong inside of the packaging before sealing.
Free diagnosis, one fixed price quoted in writing, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start online or phone it in.