A physiotherapy clinic in Wigston still ran its appointment history and a decade of exercise sheets from a 2012 MacBook Pro, on the reasonable grounds that it had never given any trouble. It stopped starting. The store they took it to reported that the hard disk was not spinning fast enough to register and that it needed a new one, quoted for the replacement, and were entirely correct about the machine. What the clinic actually wanted was the contents, and nobody had answered that question.
| Media | The hard disk out of a 2012 15-inch MacBook Pro that no longer starts. A store examination found the disk was not reaching speed and recommended replacing it. |
| What was reported | MacBook Pro from 2012, stopped working, a store found the hard disk was not spinning fast enough to register and advised a new one, appointment records and ten years of practice documents wanted off the old disk. |
| Fault class | Mechanical. The disk was drawing current and failing to reach running speed, its heads having settled onto the surface and stuck there during a long period of sitting closed and unused. The recorded material was unaffected. |
| On the bench | The disk removed from the machine and left unpowered, then profiled once on a current-limited bench supply so that a single start could be recorded as a current trace rather than repeated; opened under laminar flow with the spindle, heads and both surfaces examined under a stereo microscope; the heads lifted clear with a ramp tool and the mechanism freed; imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA; the volume parsed in R-Studio and the practice records opened in their own software before being written to fresh media. |
A repair verdict and a recovery verdict answer different questions. The store was asked whether the machine could be made to work and answered accurately: it needs a new disk. Nobody asked them whether the old one could be read, which is not a service they offer and not a criticism of them. The two answers can both be true, and a great deal of material is thrown away every year because the first one is mistaken for the second.
That generation is the last one where this is easy. The 2012 15-inch model has an ordinary 2.5-inch disk held in with a bracket and four screws. It comes out in ten minutes, travels on its own and is read on a bench like any other disk. Its successors moved to soldered storage, at which point the same fault becomes a very different conversation, so the age of the machine worked in the clinic's favour rather than against it.
Not reaching speed is usually contact, not a dead motor. A disk left closed and unused for months can end up with its heads resting on the surface rather than parked off it, and the two bond gently together. The motor then has to start against that, draws its limit and gives up. It is a well-known fault, it is repaired by lifting the heads off in clean air rather than by force, and freezing or shaking the drive makes it worse in ways that are not reversible.
The machine stayed in Wigston, which is how this is meant to work. For a laptop, a tower, a Mac or a recorder, the instruction is to free the storage and send that on its own. Taking machines apart is not work this bench does, and a whole laptop in a parcel is a large expensive object protecting a small one. The clinic's own IT contractor took the disk out in the ten minutes it takes.
Nothing was powered on arrival. On a current-limited supply the trace showed exactly what the store had described in different words: current climbing to the limit and staying flat, with no step down to a running draw and no seek activity at all.
Under laminar flow the heads were found resting on the surface rather than on their ramp. They were lifted clear and the surfaces beneath them checked across the full radius, with only the faintest witness marks and no scoring. The mechanism turned freely afterwards and the disk imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA in a single pass.
R-Studio parsed the volume out of the image. The appointment history was opened in the software the practice uses, because a database that lists but will not load is not a recovery, and a sample of the exercise sheets was opened as documents before anything was written out.
Everything came back, including a folder of scanned referral letters the clinic had assumed was only ever on paper. It went out on a new disk, and the practice has since been persuaded to keep a second copy somewhere that is not the same building.
One disk is £300 + VAT whatever machine it came out of. Opening it in clean air is mechanical work and the published exclusion names it, so 50% was settled upfront and the balance once the records had been opened. The MacBook itself never left the clinic.
Take the verdict on the machine and then ask the separate question about the contents, ideally before you agree to anything being swapped, because a replaced disk is sometimes disposed of on the spot. If the machine is old enough to have a removable disk, have it taken out and send the disk alone: the laptop is not needed, the postage is a fraction of it, and nobody here will take a machine apart for you. Do not let anyone attempt to start it repeatedly to demonstrate the fault, since a disk stuck at the start of its rotation is being loaded every time. Ignore the advice about freezers, which comes up on every forum and has ruined more disks than it has ever saved. If the machine is recent enough that its storage is soldered to the mainboard, say so at the enquiry, because that is a different answer and it is better to hear it before posting anything.
Each of these is a real enquiry, taken from a household or a business somewhere in Leicester or the surrounding county, with the name of the customer, the firm and anything else that would identify them taken out. What is left is the reasoning: what turned up, what had actually failed inside it, the method that fault required and the equipment it was worked on. One of the thirty-six is a job that was refused, and it belongs here every bit as much as the successes do.
Finding a deleted file and returning one that opens are two different pieces of work
Mounting is the Mac's opinion of a volume, and an opinion can be wrong about a healthy disk
Where there is no route in at any price, the useful answer is the one given before anything is sent
Examining it is free and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure goes to you in writing and does not move afterwards, and a logical fault carries no fix, no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.