A Mac that will not start is the most common call this freephone takes, and the honest reply is a series of questions rather than a price. Apple changed the way these machines hold data twice inside a decade, and the gap between the generations is not a matter of degree. It is the difference between an ordinary afternoon on a bench and nothing anybody can do at any price.
Apple menu, About This Mac, and read the line naming the chip or the processor. Three populations are in circulation, and when something goes wrong they may as well have been built by three different companies.
Apple Silicon means an M1, M2, M3, M4 or anything since. Its flash sits soldered onto the logic board, encrypted by the Secure Enclave from the day the machine was built. Nothing unscrews, and there is nothing to put in a parcel.
Intel with a T2 chip is roughly 2018 to 2020: the MacBook Pro and Air of those years, the iMac Pro, the Mac mini and the Mac Pro. The storage is soldered here as well, and the T2 handles the encryption whether or not FileVault was ever switched on.
Intel without a T2 is 2017 and earlier as a rule. This is the generation where storage is a removable component — a 2.5-inch SATA disk, a proprietary Apple blade held down by one screw, or in an iMac a spinning disk and a small SSD working as a pair. On a bench these behave like any other computer.
On the soldered generations this is the whole of the answer, so it is worth asking before anything else. If an M-series or T2 Mac has a dead logic board, the data has gone. Not difficult, not expensive, not a matter of finding a better laboratory. The flash cannot be lifted off and read somewhere else the way a drive can, and the keys that give those chips any meaning lived in the Secure Enclave on the board that failed. The memory may be physically perfect and it makes no difference.
That deserves to be said before anybody pays a courier. There are firms that will take such a machine in, hold it a fortnight and give you the same answer with an invoice stapled to it. Ringing to establish which generation you own is a far better use of ten minutes, and enquiries of that kind get turned down here at the enquiry stage rather than after the postage has been spent.
But if the machine still powers on in any form — it reaches recovery mode, it boots and behaves oddly, the screen or the keyboard or the battery is broken while everything else works — the storage is alive and there is a way out. Apple's own share disk mode on Apple Silicon, and target disk mode on the older Intel machines, put the storage in front of a second Mac over a cable so the data can be copied off while the patient is still breathing. If that describes your machine, do it today. That window closes without notice and nothing reopens it.
A surprising number of owners genuinely do not know. On an Intel Mac without a T2 the answer is the difference between a routine job and an impossible one. With the account password or the recovery key, the volume is imaged and the copy decrypted and the recovery proceeds like any other. With neither, it is mathematically shut and no laboratory anywhere opens it.
So go looking for the key before giving up, because it is usually filed somewhere. Switching FileVault on prompts macOS to offer to keep the recovery key in your iCloud account, and a great many people said yes to that years ago and never thought about it again. On a company laptop the management platform generally holds a copy, which makes whoever set the machine up the first call to make. Either turns a dead end into an ordinary job. An encrypted volume is £400 + VAT rather than £300 + VAT, because key material has to be handled properly and the image decrypted without the original being touched.
On Apple Silicon and T2 machines everything is encrypted whether you asked for it or not, which changes what an erase means. Erasing one of those Macs throws away the keys rather than overwriting the files, so it is genuinely final within seconds. That is reassuring when you are selling a machine and unforgiving when you have just wiped the wrong one.
A Fusion Drive is a modest SSD tied to a large spinning disk and shown to you as a single volume, with macOS shuffling blocks between the two according to what you actually open. It was a sensible piece of engineering and it has one awkward consequence in recovery: neither half holds a complete or readable file system by itself.
So both halves travel, in the same parcel, each one labelled so nobody has to guess which was which afterwards. The volume is then reassembled from images of the pair. Sending only the half that failed is the most common mistake on these machines and it stops the job before it starts, usually costing a week while the second unit follows in the post.
It remains one job at £300 + VAT rather than two, and the spinning half is the one that normally gives up. Label them as they come out — masking tape and a marker is plenty — and photograph the inside of the machine before anything is unplugged, which matters most on an iMac where the two devices live in quite different places.
Everything improves on an Intel Mac with no T2, for one reason: the storage is a part rather than a feature of the board. MacBook Pros and Airs from 2013 to 2017 carry a proprietary Apple blade under a single screw, which an adapter presents to standard equipment as an ordinary drive. Go back to 2012 or earlier and there is a 2.5-inch SATA disk under the bottom cover. iMacs of the period hold a 3.5-inch disk, a small SSD, or a pair of them working together. Whichever it is, the storage unbolts, travels by itself, and the computer stays at home.
That is £300 + VAT, the single-drive band, blade or platter and whatever the capacity. The faults are the everyday ones: a mechanical failure after a knock, a file system that came apart following a power cut, an accidental erase, an upgrade that stopped halfway through. Everything is worked against an image, so nothing is written back to your storage at any point in the process.
One Apple-specific wrinkle is worth knowing. APFS, standard since 2017, arranges its metadata quite differently from the old HFS+, with snapshots and shared free space that make some recoveries better and others distinctly harder. Neither file system is a problem so long as nobody has run repair tools across it first. Mac OS X recovery, MacBook recovery and iMac recovery take the machines one at a time.
Restarting a machine that has started making a new noise. A spinning disk in an older iMac or MacBook that has begun to tick is damaging its own surface every time it spins up, and each attempt costs material that never comes back. Switch it off and leave it off.
Running First Aid on a volume that matters. It repairs, and repairing means writing. Against a healthy volume with a small inconsistency it does no harm. Against a disk with a physical fault, or an APFS container that has fallen apart, it can convert a complete recovery into a partial one. Reaching for it first is the commonest self-inflicted injury in this whole category.
Reinstalling macOS to cure a boot problem. This does exactly what it sounds like: writes a fresh operating system across the volume holding your files. If the machine will not start and the data matters, get the storage out first, or use share disk mode on a soldered machine, before anybody reinstalls anything.
Copying folder by folder off a failing drive through a USB adapter. It feels like progress and it is the slowest possible way to do the most damage. A drive that is deteriorating should be imaged in one pass by something that can skip a bad region and come back to it, not kept warm for six hours while Finder retries the same unreadable file. The same applies to recovery software that defaults to writing its working files onto the volume it is scanning.
Two limits, stated plainly so nobody wastes a journey. Storage soldered flat to a mainboard cannot be helped once that board has failed, which covers every Apple Silicon Mac, every T2 Intel model and a growing number of slim Windows laptops as well.
And no mobile phones and no tablets are accepted, in any condition, including iPads. This is a storage bench: drives, SSDs, cards, sticks, arrays and recorder disks. An iPhone with a cracked screen is not something that can be dealt with here, and being told that on the telephone is better than discovering it after a courier has been paid.
If it unbolts, it travels and the computer does not — a 2.5-inch disk, an Apple blade, or on a Fusion iMac the pair of them with labels on. Taking machines apart is not something the Oxford bench does, and any repair shop in the city will have a drive out in ten minutes. If it does not unbolt, there is no parcel to make up, and the only question left is whether the board still comes to life.
One drive or SSD is £300 + VAT, Apple blades and NVMe on the same rung, fixed in writing once the free diagnostic closes 2 working days after booking in. A FileVault or otherwise encrypted volume is £400 + VAT and needs the password or the recovery key. A finished single-drive job usually runs 2 to 4 working days from the moment you approve the figure. Logical faults carry no fix, no fee; the four exclusions are electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR jobs and forensic jobs, at half upfront. Every band is set out on the data recovery cost page.
Wedge it so that nothing shifts in transit, put the printed shipping form in beside it, and send it tracked and insured to Oxford Data Recovery, John Eccles House, Oxford Science Park, Robert Robinson Avenue, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4GP. From Coventry that is about fifty-five miles of M40 and an hour or so if you would rather drive it down; reception takes drop-offs Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. Nobody collects and there is no counter in Coventry. If the storage is a solid state blade, what TRIM does to deleted files is worth ten minutes first, and SSD recovery carries the hardware detail. The freephone is 0800 689 0668.
Two menu clicks decide the whole of this page. If the chip line reads M-series, or the machine is a 2018-to-2020 Intel with a T2, the storage is soldered to the logic board and a dead board is the end of the story. Anything older and the drive unbolts and behaves like any other drive on the bench, at £300 + VAT.
Oxford charges nothing to examine it, and that closes 2 working days from the moment it is booked in. Whatever figure comes out of it is written down and stays there: £250 + VAT a card or stick, £300 + VAT one drive or SSD.