Folder with a question mark, endless white screen, or an iMac that simply won't wake? The photos and documents inside are usually OK. We recover iMacs with removable drives, standard SATA disks and Fusion Drives alike. Once the drive is out, it is imaged directly, wherever you live in Staines or the surrounding areas of Surrey.
Diagnostic fee: free on every Apple iMac job. We give a fixed quote in writing before we start working on your device.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. For all electronic and mechanical work, including chip-level repairs, 50% is required upfront, with the balance only payable if we recover your data. For BitLocker, ransomware, CCTV/DVR and forensic jobs, full payment is made upfront once you accept the fixed quote. Full details regarding our costs can be found on the data recovery cost page.
From symptom to fault: these twelve common symptoms cover almost everything that is brought into our workshop with an Apple iMac.
The blinking folder means the Mac can't find a boot volume. The internal drive has either failed or its contents have become corrupted.
macOS starts to load then just won't finish. Nine times out of ten this is because a failing hard drive is slowing the boot process to a crawl.
When the SSD and hard drive halves fall out of step, the logical volume falls apart. Recovery means creating images of both and reuniting them.
Older iMacs have a standard 3.5″ disk, which fails like any other standard disk; Apple just attached a pane of glass in front of it.
Firmware or storage issue at start-up: we secure your data first and worry about diagnosing afterwards.
The installer crashes halfway through and the Mac loops endlessly, but your user data remains safe underneath.
Apple's file systems break in their own particular ways, and rebuilding either one needs a parser that understands them natively.
One mis-click in Recovery Mode can erase your entire main drive. If you don't write anything else to the device afterwards, it can still be recovered.
2009 to 2011 iMacs had a 1TB Seagate internal hard drive with a known high failure rate. Many of these failed drives have been recovered using replacement heads and firmware work.
If your iMac's power supply unit or logic board fails but the removable drive inside stays healthy, extracting data from it is easy once it's out.
When the small SSD side of a Fusion Drive fails or drops out, this unbalances the pair. Both sides are first cloned as individual units and then logically merged back together again.
A DIY screen removal that damages the SATA or power cable for the internal drive can make the drive look dead. In our lab we simply re-terminate the cable and image the drive.
On an iMac the glass screen is bonded to the machine, and removing it to get at the drive is not a project for the kitchen table. Inside the iMac there can be either a single hard disk, a solid state drive (SSD), or a combination of both as a Fusion Drive. Either way, these drives will have been formatted with one of Apple's own file systems: HFS+ or APFS. Because the drive lives behind the display, it needs removing before it comes to us, as we do not provide a drive-removal service. Please get a quote first, by phone (0800 689 0668) or with our free online diagnostic, then take the drive out (or call and we'll walk you through it). We will then recover data directly from the drive when it arrives. Fusion Drives are something of a speciality: both halves have to be imaged and logically rejoined before your files exist as files again.
Our iMac recovery covers storage that can be removed and imaged: the SATA hard drive in your 2009 to 2011 model iMac, as well as both the SSD and the hard drive portion of an iMac Fusion Drive. We do not offer recovery on any iMac whose storage is soldered to the logic board and hardware-encrypted, which means all of the T2-equipped Intel-based iMacs and the M-series (Apple silicon) iMacs. Data on these machines is cryptographically bound to that particular board and can't be lifted once the board or storage has failed. We discontinued board-level recovery of soldered Mac storage two years ago because the success rate was too low to promise anyone. If you're unsure what era your machine is, please call before sending anything.
Nothing about an iMac job is generic: the tools are Apple-specific from the moment the drive arrives:
Send us the two parts of the drive and we will image each part separately. Once both are imaged they will be logically combined and the APFS or HFS+ volume rebuilt until your files come out.
Standard SATA disks, Fusion pairs and Apple's own SSD blades all plug straight into our imaging rigs, with no improvising.
A failed iMac hard drive gets the same head swaps and firmware repairs as any other disk on the bench.
We parse Apple's file systems natively and also rebuild Fusion Drive logical volumes during our process.
If a removable drive is FileVault encrypted, your password unlocks it and we rebuild the volume back to files.
A volume wiped in Disk Utility, or lost to a failed macOS update, is carved back out of whatever freed space is left.
We recover removable storage (SATA hard drives and Fusion Drive pairs) from iMacs. We frequently see failures in the 1TB Seagate hard drives used in 2009 to 2011 iMacs, a known high-failure batch, and Fusion pairs come apart when the small SSD blade drops out. For both, we keep matching Seagate and Western Digital (WD) donors in stock. T2 and Apple Silicon models have their SSD soldered to the logic board and encrypted at the hardware level, and we don't recover those. Please ring us first if you're not sure which kind you have.
Before sending anything, get a quote from us either by telephone or using our free online diagnostic. Then post your hardware to us (tracked and insured), or drop it off at our Guildford laboratory in person.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV/DVR or server? You will need to remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive, as we are unable to remove the drive for you. We also cannot recover storage soldered onto a motherboard, such as in Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops. Only drives that can be removed from a machine and sent to us can be recovered. If you are unsure whether your device has a removable drive, please call us before sending. RAID, server and SAN drives need to be removed from their enclosure and labelled by bay. For a NAS, send the disks themselves if they are removable, otherwise the entire NAS device. An external single drive should come to us whole, along with its cable and power supply.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Please mark the package for the attention of Guildford Data Recovery, and we will call you as soon as we have diagnosed your media.
Unsure as to how to proceed with sending the item in for recovery? Then simply call 0800 689 0668, or complete the free online diagnostic prior to dispatching the item to obtain your price quotation.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.