A folder with a question mark, an endless white screen, or an iMac that simply won't wake — the photos and documents inside are usually intact. We recover iMacs with removable drives, standard SATA disks and Fusion Drives alike, imaged directly once the drive is out, for customers across Staines and Surrey.
Free diagnostic on every apple imac job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
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.
Every apple imac job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twelve cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
That blinking folder means no bootable volume could be found — the internal drive has failed or its contents corrupted.
macOS begins to load then never finishes — nine times out of ten a fading drive dragging the boot to a crawl.
When the SSD and hard drive halves fall out of step the logical volume folds — recovery images both and marries them back together.
Older iMacs carry an ordinary 3.5" drive that fails in the ordinary ways — Apple just bonded a pane of glass in front of it.
A firmware or storage fault at start-up; we secure the data first and worry about the diagnosis afterwards.
The installer dies partway and the Mac loops endlessly — while your user data sits unharmed under the wreckage.
Apple's file systems fail in ways only Apple's structures do, and rebuilding either takes a native-level parser.
A single misplaced click in Recovery Mode empties the volume — still recoverable provided nothing writes to it afterwards.
The 1TB Seagate drives in 2009–2011 iMacs are a known high-failure batch — recovered with donor heads and firmware work.
The PSU or logic board dies while the removable drive inside stays healthy — once it's out, extraction is simple.
The small SSD half of a Fusion Drive fails or drops out, unbalancing the pair — imaged and logically rejoined with the hard-drive half.
A DIY screen removal that nicks the drive's SATA or power cable mimics a dead drive — re-terminated and imaged in the lab.
Getting into an iMac means releasing the bonded screen — not a kitchen-table job. Behind it sits a hard drive, an SSD, or both working together as a Fusion Drive, formatted with Apple's HFS+ or APFS. Because the drive lives behind the display, it needs removing before it comes to us — we don't run a drive-removal service, so please take the drive out first (or call and we'll walk you through it), and we recover straight from the drive once it lands. Fusion Drives are a speciality: both halves have to be imaged and logically rejoined before your files exist as files again.
Our iMac work covers storage that can be taken out and imaged: the SATA hard drives fitted to 2009–2011 machines, and both halves of a Fusion Drive's SSD-plus-hard-drive pairing. Where an iMac's storage is soldered to the logic board and hardware-encrypted — the T2-secured Intel models and the Apple Silicon (M-series) machines — recovery isn't something we offer. On those the data is welded cryptographically to that one board, unliftable once the board or storage fails, and board-level recovery of soldered Mac storage is a service we withdrew two years ago after the success rate proved too low to promise anyone. Not sure which era yours is? Call before you send anything.
Nothing about an iMac job is generic — the tooling is Apple-specific from the moment the drive arrives:
Send us the drive pair and the two halves are imaged, logically reunited, and the APFS or HFS+ volume rebuilt until your files fall out.
Standard SATA disks, Fusion pairs and Apple's proprietary SSD blades all plug straight into the imaging rigs without improvisation.
A failed iMac hard drive earns the same head swaps and firmware repairs as any other disk on the bench.
Apple's file systems parsed natively, with Fusion Drive logical volumes reassembled as part of the job.
Where a removable drive carries FileVault encryption, your password unlocks it and the volume is rebuilt back to files.
A volume emptied in Disk Utility or lost to a failed macOS update is carved back from whatever freed space remains.
Removable storage is what we recover from iMacs — the SATA hard drives and the Fusion Drive pairs. The 1TB Seagate drives fitted to 2009–2011 iMacs are a known high-failure batch we see constantly, and Fusion pairs unravel when the small SSD blade drops out; matched Seagate and WD donors are kept in stock for both. On T2 and Apple Silicon iMacs the SSD is soldered to the logic board and hardware-encrypted, and those we don't recover.
Most customers post their media to us tracked and insured.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Guildford Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.