Grey screen and nothing after it. Or a question mark folder flashing in the middle of the display. Or the start-up chime followed by silence where a desktop ought to be. In nearly every case an iMac in that state is still holding the photo library and the paperwork without a byte missing. What travels to Cambridge is the storage from inside it, either a single SATA disk or both halves of a Fusion pair, and the owners are spread across Leicester, Oadby, Loughborough and the studios and small agencies in and around the Cultural Quarter.
Every iMac that arrives here is examined at no charge. The figure quoted afterwards is put in writing and settled before anybody reaches for a screwdriver: £300 + VAT on any one hard drive or SSD, an NVMe blade counted the same.
Logical recoveries carry no fix, no fee. The named exceptions to it are electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs; physical work takes 50% up front. The five bands are set out in full on the data recovery cost page.
Tracing a symptom back to the failure underneath it is where the real work begins, and these thirty account for all but a handful of the boxes opened at the Cambridge bench. A fault missing from the list is not an unfamiliar one — describe it on the telephone and you will get a straight view of the odds before you spend anything on postage.
The Mac has looked for a bootable system and found nothing to hand over to. That is a missing or damaged boot structure rather than an empty disk, and the photo library behind it is generally untouched. Every restart repeats the same failed read across the same region, so stopping is the useful move.
The system has started loading and stalled on something it cannot read. On a spinning disk that means unreadable sectors in the wrong place. On a Fusion pair it frequently means the two halves have lost their relationship. Both are worked from images rather than from the original disks.
Fusion joins a small SSD and a large hard disk into one logical volume, and neither half is readable on its own. If the pair has broken, both drives have to arrive, each one labelled, so the volume can be reassembled from images of the two. Send one and there is nothing to reconstruct.
Long periods of the spinning cursor are usually a disk relocating sectors it can no longer read reliably. That is a warning that runs for months before the failure, and it is exactly the window in which a full image is straightforward. After the failure, the same job takes longer and returns less.
An interrupted upgrade leaves the system unbootable and the user data untouched. Nothing has been deleted. The files are lifted out of an image of the volume, which sidesteps the update entirely, and it is one of the more common and more cheerful arrivals here.
The actuator resetting because the heads have stopped reading. iMac chassis transmit that sound well and it usually gets attributed to a fan first. Once it starts, the number of further power-ups that improve anything is zero, and each one takes more of the coating away.
Power supplies and logic boards fail on their own schedule and say nothing about the disk. A dead iMac frequently contains a perfectly healthy drive holding twenty years of photographs. Getting the drive out of one is more work than a tower, but the machine itself never needs to travel.
From the 2017 generation onward, and universally on Apple Silicon, the flash is fixed permanently to the board. That is outside what is done here and there is no route around it. If your iMac has a T2 chip or an M-series processor, the honest answer is no, and it is better heard before the postage.
APFS keeps its metadata in a container shared by several volumes, and damage to that container takes all of them out at once. Snapshots and the checkpoint history frequently allow an earlier consistent state to be found, which is one of the few genuine advantages the format has when things go wrong.
Disk Utility has very few tools and erase is one of the more prominent. It is not a repair. The volume failing to mount says the structures are damaged, not that the contents have gone. Quit, shut the machine down, and let the disk be read at block level.
Repair attempts write to the volume they are repairing, and on a disk with physical damage they spend the reliable reads that are left. Two attempts tell you what one attempt did. Beyond that it is worth stopping, and it is worth saying on the booking form how many were run.
Sparse bundles and APFS snapshots are more fragile than the restore interface suggests. A backup reported as corrupt is usually looking at a damaged index rather than at missing data. The files are recovered directly from an image, which avoids the restore process altogether.
FileVault is properly implemented full-disk encryption and it does not yield to effort. What can be found is the recovery key, which is frequently escrowed against an Apple account or written down during setup. Encrypted drive work is 400 pounds + VAT. Where the key is genuinely gone, that is said plainly.
A head working cold and failing warm, or a board component drifting with temperature. iMacs run their disks hot at the best of times because of where they are mounted. Imaging in short cooled passes recovers considerably more than one long optimistic attempt.
Migration Assistant occasionally leaves a partial account behind, or copies a profile and then loses the reference to it. Nothing is usually deleted. The old volume gets read and the missing account is lifted from it, which is a good deal simpler than trying to repeat the migration.
Erasing and reinstalling writes a new file system across the front of the disk. On a spinning disk the previous contents are largely intact further in. On an SSD, trimming begins immediately and the position is much less encouraging. Which of the two you have decides how urgent the call is.
Several iMac generations used a cable that fails before the disk does, and the symptom is a drive that appears intermittently or not at all. It is worth ruling in, because it means the storage is intact. This gets established during the free assessment rather than assumed either way.
Original iMac disks are still in service in a surprising number of households. Hour counts in six figures, spare sectors exhausted, and a machine that has been slow for years. There is no drama in these until the day there is, and the sensible response to a machine of that age is a full image while it still cooperates.
The disk is answering and the partition map or the container header is damaged. That is a small amount of data at the front of a large disk and it says nothing about the rest. Rebuilding from the structures further in is routine and gives back a mountable volume.
The logical volume group has lost its metadata rather than either disk having failed. Both members get imaged and the group is reconstructed from the copies. This is why the pair must never be separated, relabelled or reformatted individually, however tempting a fresh start looks.
The commonest shape of the phone call rather than a fault. An iMac in a family house is where the photo library lives, and iCloud storage that ran out three years ago is not a backup. It is worth naming plainly, because a recovery is the expensive way of solving something a second disk would have prevented.
Less common on macOS than on Windows but not unknown, and the machine is usually physically healthy afterwards. What comes back depends on the variant and on what was written since. It is priced as ordinary media at 300 pounds + VAT for a single drive, and it is never billed as forensic work.
Video and design work spreads a project across the internal disk and one or more externals, and losing any of them breaks the project. Send everything that was part of it, labelled, because reassembling a project from one volume out of three is guesswork nobody should pay for.
Corrosion carries on working long after everything looks dry, and the logic board is usually the casualty. The disk sits away from the worst of it in most models. It comes out, gets cleaned if it needs it, and is read normally, which is a far better prospect than the machine itself.
iMacs are quiet machines and a failed fan goes unnoticed for a long time. A disk running well above its rating develops read errors it would not otherwise have, and those errors are permanent even after the fan is replaced. The damage is already recorded on the surface.
Machines from before the SATA era still turn up, usually out of a studio cupboard or a university office. Adapters and period donors are held here permanently. Age on its own is no reason to write a disk off, and a good number of these read in full once their heads are freed.
Long scans keep a damaged disk powered and working for hours, which is precisely the wrong treatment, and some tools write their own working files onto the volume they are scanning. Say what was run and for how long. It rarely rules anything out and it always changes the order of the work.
The mini uses the same storage arrangements as the iMac of its year, including Fusion pairs, and it is handled identically here. The only real difference is that a mini is small enough that people are tempted to post the whole machine. Send the drive, not the computer.
If the volume was encrypted, or the enclosure it came from encrypted in hardware, the bare disk on its own gives back nothing readable. That is not damage. Send the disk together with whatever it came out of, and say clearly what has already been tried.
No fault, just an old iMac being replaced and nobody quite sure how to get twenty years of files out of it. The drive comes out, gets read, and the contents go back on fresh media. It is the least expensive job on this page and the one most often postponed until something breaks.
This is the part of the page that costs people the most when it is missed. Fusion joins a small SSD and a large hard disk into one logical volume, and neither half means anything on its own. The SSD holds the most recently used blocks and the disk holds the rest, and the mapping between them lives in metadata spread across both. So when a Fusion iMac stops working, both drives have to travel, each one labelled with which it is. Send one and there is nothing to reconstruct, however healthy that one turns out to be. It also follows that neither half should be reformatted, erased or set up as a standalone volume in an attempt to get the machine usable again, because that destroys the metadata the reconstruction depends on. The pair is treated as one job here rather than two, at £300 + VAT, and the reassembly happens on read-only images of both members rather than on the drives themselves.
An iMac is a large fragile object built around a small piece of storage, and the screen makes it the worst possible thing to put in a parcel. The drive comes out and the machine stays with you. Getting into one is more work than a tower and it wants a plastic tool and a careful hand rather than force, so if the panel resists, ring before something cracks. That covers every model up to the point where Apple stopped fitting storage that can be removed. From the 2017 generation onward, and universally on Apple Silicon, the flash is soldered to the logic board and there is no route into it here or anywhere else honest. If your machine has a T2 chip or an M-series processor, the answer is no and it is better heard before the postage. Everything on the other side of that line, including the SATA disks, the Fusion pairs and Apple's own blade SSDs, is handled in the ordinary way at ordinary prices, and an encrypted volume with FileVault on it is £400 + VAT rather than £300.
What travels from an iMac is the storage, and once it arrives it goes onto the same benches as everything else in the building. Apple's own file systems and its Fusion arrangement need particular handling, and that is what most of the equipment below is for.
Container headers, checkpoint history, snapshot metadata and catalogue files rebuilt from an image. APFS keeps several volumes inside one container, so damage takes them all out together, and finding an earlier consistent checkpoint is frequently the shortest route back.
The logical volume group is rebuilt from read-only images of both members. Neither the SSD nor the hard disk means anything on its own, and nothing is ever tested against the original disks, which is why both have to arrive and both have to be labelled.
The 3.5-inch disks in older iMacs are ordinary mechanisms and they get the same treatment as any other: head replacements, stack removals and platter transfers under filtered air with the drive levelled and supported.
Copies taken one head at a time with retry limits enforced in hardware. iMac disks run hot for years and tend to arrive with weak regions rather than clean failures, which is exactly the case per-sector retry control was built for.
SATA in both sizes, the proprietary blade connectors used between 2010 and 2017, and the thermal sensor arrangements that stop a bare Apple disk from behaving normally on a bench. A drive that will not talk to a generic adapter often talks to the right one.
Where an encrypted volume is also failing, the imaging happens first with the volume still sealed and the key is applied to the copy afterwards. Typing a password repeatedly into a struggling disk spends the reliable reads it has left and proves nothing.
Send the drive rather than the machine. An iMac is a large fragile object built around a small piece of storage, and the screen makes it the worst possible thing to put in a parcel. If the machine has a Fusion drive, both halves have to travel and each one needs a label, because the volume cannot be reassembled from one of them and the small SSD on its own reads as meaningless. A single drive or SSD is 300 pounds + VAT and a Fusion pair is treated as one job rather than two. The assessment costs nothing and closes two working days after the parcel is booked in. An encrypted volume, FileVault included, is 400 pounds + VAT. Storage soldered to the logic board, which covers every Apple Silicon machine and the later Intel models with a T2 chip, is outside what can be done here, and that is said before postage rather than after.
The post office does most of the work of getting a job here. A drive that is already unwell travels better boxed and insured than rattling around a car for a day of errands, and something dropped into a Leicestershire postbox this afternoon is generally logged in at Cambridge tomorrow.
The general rule is the drive travels and the machine stays behind — out of the laptop, out of the tower, out of the iMac, out of the recorder under the counter. This bench does not dismantle equipment, and a repair shop will do it while you wait. Three things are the other way round, and getting them wrong costs you the recovery: an external drive stays sealed in its own case, a NAS comes as a complete unit, and a WD My Passport or My Book travels whole with its cable, because on those the encryption key is held on the bridge board rather than on the disk — separate the two and the data becomes unreadable even to us. A Fusion Mac needs both of its drives, each labelled. The one thing nobody can work round is flash soldered onto the mainboard, as on Apple Silicon machines: if it will not come off, there is nothing to post.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Cambridge Data Recovery. It is about seventy miles from Leicester if you fancy driving it — M1 south to Junction 19, then the A14 east — and the lab is two minutes off Junction 32 with parking at the door. Posting costs you a stamp and a day instead. Whichever you choose, you hear from us the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes two working days after that.
Not certain what belongs in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape it up, or let the free online diagnostic ask the questions for you.
The examination is free, one written figure follows it, and the band covering this page is £300 + VAT on any one hard drive or SSD, an NVMe blade counted the same.