A grey screen that never moves on. A question mark folder blinking away in the centre. A chime, and then silence where the desktop should be. An iMac behaving like that has almost always kept the photo library and the paperwork perfectly intact. What comes here is the storage inside it, either one plain SATA disk or the two components of a Fusion pair, and the owners are spread across Liverpool and the rest of Merseyside.
Every apple imac job is diagnosed free. One fixed figure follows in writing, agreed before a screwdriver comes out of the drawer.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Every band is listed on the data recovery cost page.
Matching the symptom to the fault underneath is the first job on any apple imac, and after twenty-odd years these thirty account for very nearly everything that arrives.
The Mac has found nothing it can start from. That points at a failed internal drive or at a file system that has torn, and both of those recover. Which of the two you are looking at cannot be read off an icon, and it cannot be settled down a telephone line either.
macOS sets off and never arrives, usually because the disk underneath it now reads at walking pace. It gets captured before walking pace turns into standing still, because that is the direction this always travels.
The blade and the hard disk lose track of one another, and the volume spread across the two of them dissolves. We image each half separately and reassemble the partnership in software afterwards.
The larger Macs of a certain vintage hold a completely ordinary 3.5-inch drive, failing in a completely ordinary way, with a sheet of glued glass in front of it. Out it comes, and the files go back.
Storage or firmware misbehaving before the login window ever appears. Data comes off first and the argument about diagnosis happens later. Putting the diagnosis first has never once improved a result here.
The update died partway and the machine has been going round in circles ever since. Beneath all of that, the user folders sit exactly as they were the minute before it started.
Apple's file systems break in Apple's own particular ways, and general-purpose tools translate them badly. We read them natively. That is the difference between getting a folder tree back and getting a heap of nameless fragments.
One misread dialog box in Recovery and a volume disappears. Carving brings it back, but only for as long as the freed blocks stay untouched. The machine goes off at the wall now and stays off until the drive is in the post.
Fitted right the way across that run of model years, and failing young from the beginning. Donors for them stopped being an order-in item here many years ago and became permanent shelf stock instead.
Two expensive parts retired in a single event, with the removable drive sitting untouched behind them. Apple can mourn the logic board. The drive is the part that had anything of yours on it.
On a Fusion setup it is usually the SSD that stops first, and the joint volume strands the instant it does. Both halves are imaged and the pairing is put back together in software. Nobody tries to reassemble it inside a Mac and hope for the best.
Hand over the credentials and encrypted APFS behaves like any other volume on the bench. Write the password on a slip of paper and send it with the drive. Without it, the conversation is a very short one.
An iMac that has slowed to a crawl is a disk dying in instalments. Capture it while it can still answer at all. That window shuts, and it shuts without warning anybody first.
Somebody has been in with a suction cup and a guitar pick. What usually gets caught is the SATA lead or the power lead, rather than anything that matters. The drive itself tends to survive being freed, whatever state the adhesive strips end up in.
A sick volume that will not show up even over Thunderbolt has run out of gentle options. The drive comes out of the chassis and goes onto an imager. Nothing else on that list is worth the risk.
From 2012 the machines got thinner and switched to laptop-class disks in very tight spaces. Years spent at temperature end in bad sectors. The answer is hardware imaging rather than patience, given that patience is what caused it.
Boxed up, driven across the city, unboxed, and now ticking. Platters object to being transported far more strongly than owners expect. Donor parts in filtered air settle the argument.
Losing power mid-write shreds the file system's journal, and the volume then refuses to mount. It gets rebuilt from a complete image, calmly, instead of by running repair tools at a disk that is already unhappy.
A batch of 3TB Seagates went into machines during 2012 and 2013 with a defect that later became well known. Plenty of owners never heard about the replacement programme until after it had closed. By now this is thoroughly rehearsed work.
A damp room furs up the edge connector on the SSD until it starts falling off the bus intermittently, and then for good. The contacts are cleaned, the blade goes onto one of our own adapters, and it images.
APFS needs free space both to start up and to repair itself, and a full volume has none to offer. The snapshots holding that room will not stand aside on request. Image the whole thing, then untangle it at leisure on the copy.
Fusion before APFS sits on top of Core Storage. That metadata tears in ways which Disk Utility will not even discuss with you. It gets stitched back together by hand, out of both halves.
A phone goes missing, somebody panics, and the iMac gets erased alongside it. How much survives comes down entirely to whether FileVault was switched on, and you get that answer immediately rather than in instalments.
Failing RAM writes small errors into files for months before anyone spots it, and every backup dutifully preserves the damage. A healthy disk holding untrustworthy data. It gets audited rather than taken on trust.
That is the spindle bearing giving notice. Not fatal yet, and not fine either. The sensible moment to image it is while getting it out is still a routine errand rather than an emergency.
Upgrading an old machine rewrites the volume in place while everything stays where it is. Drop the power partway, or hit a failing sector, and you end up with a disk half described by the old scheme and half by the new one. It will not mount, and disk utilities only deepen the hole. We read both structures off an image and follow the newer one for as long as it holds together.
Apple ran a dedicated temperature lead down to the internal hard disk on several generations. Fray that lead and the fans go to full speed, the machine acts exactly as though the disk were dying, and the disk is in perfect health. Worth ruling out before anybody buys a replacement.
The new machine was set up, the transfer looked complete, and the old one was erased and sold on. A month later somebody notices a folder that never arrived. What remains sits on the old disk beneath the erase, and how much of it returns depends on how little has been written since.
With iCloud Photos set to optimise storage, the full-size originals live on Apple servers and 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 more. We recover what is genuinely there and we say plainly what is not.
An engineer swapped the hard disk, left the SSD out of the rebuild, and never recreated the logical volume. The surviving half now reads as empty to everything that looks at it, while it still holds most of what was there. Putting the two back together in software is what fixes it.
The display on an iMac is glued to the frame, so the disk behind it comes out with a plastic tool and a bit of patience. That part is down to you at your end, since machines are not dismantled at this one. Phone and the process gets explained, or hand it to any Apple repair shop in the city centre and they will have it apart in minutes. After the drive lands here everything is routine. Both HFS+ and APFS are read natively, and an Apple disk that clicks goes to the clean bench exactly like any other clicking disk. Fusion Drives get treated as the peculiar arrangement they are, with a small SSD and a large mechanical disk presented to macOS as one volume, an idea that reads well until either half breaks and takes the other down with it. The two devices are imaged one at a time, their pairing is worked out again in software, and files are pulled from that reconstruction while your originals sit untouched.
Everything hinges on one question: does the storage come out? A 2009 to 2011 iMac with a 3.5-inch SATA disk, yes, and plenty of those are still earning their keep in offices around the city. A Fusion-era machine with a blade sitting next to a mechanical drive, also yes, and one of the steadier Apple lines on the booking sheet. A T2-secured Intel model, or anything running on Apple Silicon, no. The flash on those is built into the logic board, soldered down and encrypted by the hardware, which binds the data to that single board and nothing else. Soldered Apple jobs were withdrawn from the service list about two years back, once it became clear that too small a share of them succeeded to charge for in good conscience. A single phone call sorts out which model year is sitting on your desk, and that call is the cheapest diagnostic there is.
Nothing in the iMac workflow gets improvised. Native adapters, native file systems, native volume structures, start to finish:
Each half is captured on its own. The two are then rejoined, and the APFS or HFS+ volume that sat across the pair turns back into ordinary folders.
Blades, Fusion pairs and plain SATA disks all connect properly into the imaging stack. Nothing in this process is improvised out of a spare Mac.
A spinning disk that fails mechanically inside an iMac takes the route every other one in this building takes: donor heads, firmware work, filtered air. The Apple badge does not alter the physics.
Both file systems read natively, with Fusion logical volumes reassembled as part of the standard job rather than billed as something extra.
An encrypted volume on removable storage opens with the password you provide and comes back as plain readable folders. If nobody has the password, we say so at the diagnostic stage.
A volume lost to one wrong click in Disk Utility, or to a failed update, comes back by carving. The condition attached is that its freed space has not been written over since.
It all reduces to one question: does the storage come out? On SATA disks and on Fusion pairs it does. The most predictable failure of that whole era remains those 1TB Seagates of 2009 to 2011, which is precisely why donors for them are kept racked here permanently. From the T2 generation onward, and on every Apple Silicon model, the SSD is soldered down and encrypted against the board. We retired that work rather than sell odds no honest person could quote. A Fusion machine needs both devices sent, the blade and the hard disk, each one labelled so we know which was which. If you are unsure what is sitting in front of you, ring 0800 689 0668 on a weekday between 9:00am and 5:30pm and describe the machine. A free diagnostic takes two working days from the moment a drive reaches the bench, but this one question is usually settled on the phone, well before anything goes in the post.
Almost every job on this bench came in by tracked, insured post. It is the calmest way to move a drive that is already struggling, and a parcel handed in anywhere on Merseyside usually reaches the bench the following working day.
Still screwed inside a laptop, tower, MacBook, iMac, server or a CCTV recorder? Take the drive out and post that on its own. We do not strip machines here, and any computer shop will do it in a few minutes. The one job nobody can take on is flash soldered straight to a logic board, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a handful of very slim laptops: if the storage will not unbolt, there is nothing to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Manchester Data Recovery. It is roughly 35 miles from Liverpool along the M62 if you fancy the run, and next working day by tracked post if you do not. We ring or email the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes 2 working days after that.
Not sure what belongs in the parcel? Call 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or step through the free online diagnostic first.
Diagnosis free, one figure written down, and £300 + VAT covers a single drive or SSD. Start online or ring.