You are seeing either a grey screen with no response, a folder with a question mark blinking in the middle of it, or the startup chime has played but then nothing appears to have happened. When you see any of these behaviours from an iMac, it can be safely assumed the photo library and paperwork have been preserved. We provide recovery for the removable storage within the iMac, such as single SATA drives or the two halves of a Fusion pair, to Apple owners in Norwich and throughout Norfolk.
Every Apple iMac job is diagnosed free. The quote is fixed in writing prior to ever taking out a screwdriver.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Electronic, mechanical, chip-level and physical work is charged at 50% upfront. Ransomware, forensic, BitLocker and CCTV/DVR jobs are charged 100% upfront on acceptance of our fixed quotation. Please refer to the data recovery cost page for full details on costs.
The first thing we do with every iMac we receive into our shop is match the symptoms to the fault. After working with these computers for twenty-odd years, the list of common issues below represents about 30 problems that encompass almost everything we see coming through our door.
When nothing bootable is found, this could mean two things: your internal drive has completely failed OR your file system has come apart. Either way, both can be recovered. Just looking at the folder icon (or talking to anyone over the phone) is NOT going to tell you which one you have.
If macOS starts but won't load, chances are good that your drive is slowing down significantly, likely to a crawl. We image it before it completely stops functioning, because that is the way it is heading.
Sometimes the SSD and hard disk drift apart and start to work independently. At this point, the volume that was created by combining both of them no longer exists. We create an image of each half separately and then combine them again using software.
In older big-screen Macs, there is often an ordinary 3.5 inch hard drive failing in an ordinary way, hiding behind the glued glass panel. Out it comes, and the data goes home.
If storage or firmware misbehaves prior to logging in, we extract your data first and perform the diagnosis afterwards (we have NEVER had one case where doing it the other way round made sense).
Your installer was interrupted while installing and now the machine continues to loop endlessly. However, below that looping behaviour your user folders are just as they were before it started.
Apple file systems fail in their own unique manner. This makes generic data recovery programs difficult to use because they are unable to properly parse them. Here they are read natively, which is the difference between a folder tree and a heap of fragments.
One wrong click in Recovery. It can come back, as long as nothing is written to the volume in the meantime, so the machine stays switched off from that moment on.
Those models have been failing at an early age ever since they were fitted. We have had donor stock for them as a permanent fixture here for a very long time instead of ordering them in.
The power supply and logic board failed together. The removable drive was left intact behind them. Apple may be mourning the loss of their board but it's the drive that is important.
When using a Fusion setup the SSD usually goes ahead of the hard disk and thus strands the combined volume. Each is imaged and then the union is rebuilt logically rather than by piecing it back together hopefully.
Once credentials are provided, an encrypted APFS volume is opened and rebuilt just like any other. Please write the password down and send it to us; without it, the answer is a short one.
A crawling iMac is a disk that is dying slowly. That crawling period is when it is useful to image the disk, because once that window of opportunity closes, and it closes without warning, there is no coming back from it.
Home surgery catches the SATA and power leads far more often than it damages anything essential. Most of the time the drive also survives being removed from its casing, regardless of how badly damaged the glass appears.
If a failing volume does not show up even there, then there is but one safe path left: take the drive out and make an image of it. There are no other options that are worth taking a chance on.
Laptop class hard drives installed in the slim systems built after 2012 have been exposed to heat for many years and as such have aged into bad sectors. Hardware imaging is the answer instead of waiting, because waiting is what created this issue.
Boxed, driven, unboxed and now ticking. Platters hate travelling more than their owners expect. The donor parts and the head-swap bench settle the argument.
Losing power while writing data leaves the file system's journal broken and the volume unable to mount. It is rebuilt calmly from a full image, without using repair utilities against it.
The defect in certain 3TB Seagate drives installed in 2012 and 2013 is widely documented. Many users who had this issue missed the replacement window entirely. It is a well rehearsed job here today.
Damp rooms clog up the SSD's edge contacts until it drops offline intermittently and eventually stops working altogether. We clean them up, re-seat them on our own adapters and image them.
When there is no free space within APFS to boot or repair (and the snapshots using it will not release it), we image the entire drive and sort it out later.
Fusion from before APFS is based on Core Storage. Its metadata becomes damaged in such a way that Disk Utility cannot even describe the damage. Both halves of the Fusion are stitched together manually.
Lost phone, remote wipe in a panic; as a result your iMac was erased as well. How much data remains intact depends on whether FileVault was enabled, and you will get that answer straight.
RAM fails and corrupts files for months until someone discovers what happened, and by then the backups have faithfully kept the damage. Good drive, bad data. We don't assume; it gets audited.
Spindle bearing letting you know it will retire. In good enough shape, but not great, and imaging it makes sense while taking it out is still an easy task.
Upgrading an older machine converts the volume in place; a sudden loss of power (or failure of a single sector) during this process will have converted the first half of the disk using one structure, and the second half using another. Thereafter nothing mounts, and disk utilities make it worse. Both structures are read from an image, and the newer one is followed to whatever it can still reach.
Apple put a dedicated thermal sensor wire to the internal hard disk in several generations. Once this wire wears out, the fans run at full speed, and your computer acts as if the drive is failing, even if it's perfectly healthy. This is something worth checking before anyone replaces anything.
A new Mac was set up, everything appeared to have transferred properly, and the old machine was wiped clean and sold. However, a folder went missing somewhere along the way. Everything left behind is on the old disk under the wipe, which can be recovered in proportion to how little data has been written to the disk since.
When you use iCloud Photos to optimise your Mac's storage, full resolution images are stored in the cloud and your Mac will store low resolution versions. If you lose access to the iCloud account or if the library is deleted from it, then all the Mac has is low res versions. We recover what is really on the disk and say clearly what isn't.
An engineer previously replaced the hard disk, left the SSD out, and never rebuilt the logical volume. So now one disk appears empty to every program that reads it, yet still contains most of the data. Joining the two together again in software is what puts it back.
The iMac's disk is hidden behind a screen glued to the casing, so it takes a steady hand and a plastic tool to reach it, and that is your job, rather than ours, as we don't remove drives from machines. Call us and we will explain what is involved, or visit any Apple repair shop in Norwich, who will be able to do this easily. Once it has arrived the work is ordinary: both HFS+ and APFS are read natively, a clicking Apple hard drive goes onto our head-swap bench like any other brand of hard drive, and a Fusion Drive is treated as the odd arrangement it is. Inside a Fusion Drive there are two devices, 1 smaller solid state drive (SSD) and 1 larger hard disk, which are presented to macOS as a single volume. This is nice until half of it fails and pulls the other half down. Each device is then copied individually, they are paired again using software, and all data is retrieved from that reconstruction rather than from your originals.
It all depends on whether the storage can be unplugged. A 2009 to 2011 iMac with a 3.5-inch SATA disk: yes, and a surprisingly large number of them remain in use. A Fusion era machine with a blade as well as a hard disk: also yes, and one of the commonest Apple jobs here. A T2 secured Intel iMac or anything running on Apple Silicon: no. Those have an SSD that is soldered onto the logic board, with hardware encryption over it, which welds your data to that particular board. Soldered Apple work came off our service list roughly two years ago, when it became apparent that the proportion that succeeded was simply too small to charge anybody for fairly. One phone call establishes which model year you have, and it is the cheapest diagnostic available anywhere.
From the first adapter all the way through to the finished copy, all steps of the iMac work remain Apple native throughout:
Each half is imaged separately. They are joined together in software. The APFS or HFS+ volume that sits on top of them is rebuilt into regular files and folders.
Blades, Fusion pairs and plain SATA disks can all be plugged natively into our imaging stack. Improvisation is not a factor here in any shape or form.
A mechanical failure inside an iMac takes the same donor head and firmware route as any other spinning drive in this building. Being branded with an Apple logo does not alter the physics.
Both file systems are read natively, with Fusion logical volume reassembly included as standard instead of as an extra.
An encrypted volume on a removable drive opens with the password you provide and comes back as plain, readable folders. If there is no password, we say so at the time of the diagnostic.
Any volumes lost through a single slip in Disk Utility, or as a result of a failed update, are recoverable by carving if the freed area remains unwritten.
The only question to ask is will the storage come out? The SATA disks and Fusion pairs will, and the most dependable failure from that time is still the short lived 1TB Seagates fitted between 2009 and 2011, for which donor units remain permanently in a rack. On T2 and Apple Silicon hardware the encrypted SSD is bonded into the logic board, therefore that work has been retired here rather than quoting odds nobody honest could give. If you are unsure what type of machine you have, call and describe it. The diagnostic is free and takes two working days after it arrives; however, typically we can settle this question before anything is posted.
Most items arrive at this bench by insured and tracked post. We recommend getting a quote first, either by telephone or using our free online diagnostic, and once you have received your quote, simply post the item. Post is the steadiest way to move a poorly drive, and a parcel sent from Norfolk typically arrives on the bench within a working day.
Is the drive still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR recorder? Before sending, remove the hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD), as we do not accept whole units. From a DVR or recorder, send just the disk. From a server or RAID, take out the disks and clearly label each disk by bay number. A network attached storage (NAS) device may be sent as its disks if they can be removed; otherwise please send the NAS itself. There is only one type of drive we are unable to accept: storage soldered onto a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs, extremely thin laptops). In such cases, if the storage cannot be taken out it cannot be accepted. If you are unsure whether you have a removable drive or not, call us before sending anything.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Please mark the parcel for the attention of Cambridge Data Recovery. It takes about an hour and twenty minutes to travel from Norwich along the A11, then two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32. Otherwise you can post it using a tracked service and we will receive it the following working day. We will contact you as soon as we have your drive and it is booked onto our bench.
If you're unsure of what to include in the box, please call us on 0800 689 0668 before sealing it. Or, for a first view on what we can do, you can use our free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, one fixed figure written down, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start online or ring us.