The "screen goes stripey when starting up & then goes blank", and the owner "cannot do anything on it at all". An Apple shop looked at the 2007 iMac and said it was "not worth repairing", which as an economic judgement is entirely correct and as a data judgement is beside the point. Stripes followed by a blank screen is a graphics fault, and graphics faults have no bearing whatsoever on the drive. The photographs, music and documents are sitting on a perfectly ordinary hard drive inside a machine that can no longer show you anything. Take the drive out and none of the display trouble follows it. This is the cheerful end of Mac work.
| Media | A 2007 iMac whose display stripes at start-up and then goes blank, deemed uneconomic to repair, holding photographs, music and documents that were never backed up. |
| Reported situation | iMac, 2007 · screen stripes on start-up then goes blank · machine unusable · Apple shop advised it was not worth repairing and did not recover the data · nothing ever backed up · photographs, music and documents wanted. |
| Fault class | Graphics or display failure — the video hardware has failed, so the machine can no longer produce a picture. The hard drive is an independent component and generally unaffected; it is removed and read directly, with the display fault entirely bypassed. |
| Equipment used | The drive removed from the iMac and read directly with a write-blocker sitting in front of it, PC-3000 UDMA driving it, its health confirmed first · copied to an image on DeepSpar, the Mac filesystem taken apart in R-Studio · photographs, music and documents located, checked by rendering, and written to fresh media. The display fault was never a factor. |
Stripes, coloured bars or a chequered pattern at start-up, followed by nothing at all, is the classic signature of a graphics processor or its solder joints failing. Machines of this era are particularly prone to it — the chips run hot in a slim all-in-one case, the joints fatigue over years of heating and cooling, and eventually the picture goes. It is genuinely uneconomic to fix on a machine this old, and the shop was right to say so.
But a graphics fault is a fault in the part that draws the picture, and the hard drive has nothing to do with drawing pictures. It is an ordinary 3.5-inch drive, connected by an ordinary cable, holding the photographs, the music library and the documents in an ordinary Mac filesystem. Take it out of the machine and it is simply a drive, readable on any suitable bench with no reference to iMacs, displays or 2007 at all.
The only thing worth checking first is the drive's own health, because a machine of this vintage may well have a drive of the same vintage. So it is profiled before it is read in bulk, and if it turns out to have its own problems, that is priced honestly rather than being folded in as a surprise. Most of the time it does not. What people generally lose in this situation is not the data but the years they spend assuming the machine's death was the data's death, which is why the message here is worth saying twice: a Mac that cannot show you anything can still hand you everything.
The drive came out of the iMac and went on PC-3000 UDMA with a write-blocker wired in line, where its health was confirmed before anything was read in bulk — a sensible precaution on a drive that has been running since 2007. It read well, so it was imaged using DeepSpar in a single controlled pass. The Mac filesystem was taken apart in R-Studio, and the photographs, music and documents were located and rendered to confirm they opened before the whole set went onto fresh media.
Drive read directly, imaged, and the photographs, music and documents written out to fresh media — everything the machine had been sitting on since it went dark. The diagnostic cost nothing; the figure that followed was fixed, written and inclusive of VAT. The drive was healthy and the work was logical, so no fix, no fee applied: nothing recovered would have meant nothing to pay. The iMac itself remains, as advised, not worth repairing; the data was never the same question.
Do not confuse a machine being beyond economic repair with your data being beyond reach — they are different questions, and the shop that answered the first was not answering the second. Stripes at start-up and then a blank screen is a graphics failure, and the drive holding your photographs and music has taken no part in it. On an iMac of this age the drive is an ordinary one on an ordinary connector, and it comes out and reads perfectly well by itself. Do not have the machine wiped, recycled or traded in before the drive has come out — that is the only way this story ends badly, and it ends badly rather often, usually about a fortnight before somebody thinks to ask.
Every case file here is written up from a real enquiry handled for households and businesses across Norwich and Norfolk, anonymised so that nobody is identifiable. Each sets out the reasoning behind the diagnosis and the method used on that particular fault, with the equipment named.
The crash stopped the computer, not the storage — and the moment to look is before the recycling run, not after
Apple's test asks whether the storage answers; when it does not, the module comes out and is read on its own terms
Magnetism does not fade in a drawer — the fault to deal with is the fall, and the fifteen years are neither here nor there
Diagnosis costs nothing and takes up to 2 working days from arrival, the quote is fixed in writing, and logical work runs no fix, no fee — start online or ring the freephone.