A grey screen and nothing after it. A question mark folder blinking in the middle of the display. The start-up sound followed by silence where a desktop should be. An iMac in any of those states is nearly always still holding the photo library and the paperwork intact. What goes to Oxford is the storage from inside it — one SATA disk, or both halves of a Fusion pair — and the owners run from households to the small studios and practices around the city and Leamington.
Looking at an iMac costs nothing. What comes out of that examination is one written figure, agreed between us before anybody picks up a screwdriver: £300 + VAT for one hard disk or SSD, an NVMe blade counting as a single drive.
Logical work is no fix, no fee. Four things sit outside that: electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic work, and anything physical is half up front. All five bands are laid out on the data recovery cost page, while data recovery services follows a postal job from the parcel to the answer.
Tracing a symptom back to whatever caused it is where the job genuinely starts, and these thirty cover very nearly every box opened on the Oxford bench. A fault that is not on the list is not an unfamiliar one: describe it over the telephone and you will get a straight reading of the odds before you have spent a penny on postage.
The machine has looked for something to start from and found nothing it recognises. Sometimes the disk has stopped answering, sometimes the volume is whole and only the pointer to a system has gone. Holding the power button for another go is the reflex, and it is the wrong one, especially if there has been any noise from inside the case.
Start-up has reached the disk, begun reading, and stalled on something it cannot get past. Left alone the machine will keep trying for hours, which means hours of a struggling drive being asked to reread the same damaged area. Switch it off at the wall rather than leaving it to work it out.
An iMac is a sealed aluminium box and it carries sound well, so a tick from a 3.5-inch disk inside one is usually quite clear once the room is quiet. It is the heads failing to find their bearings and the actuator resetting. Every further start-up costs a little more of the surface, so the machine should go off and stay off.
Fusion is a small blade SSD and a large mechanical disk bonded by software into one volume, and in an iMac they sit in two different places inside the chassis. When the pairing breaks, the machine shows either nothing or a fragment. Both drives have to travel and both have to be labelled, because neither half means anything without the other.
A spinning wheel on every click for the best part of a year is a mechanical disk retrying reads it cannot complete first time. Owners get used to it and carry on. That period was the easy window for a full image, and the machine refusing to wake is the point at which it closed.
An upgrade interrupted by a power cut or an error leaves a machine that will not start and a home folder that has not been touched. Nothing has been deleted. The volume is read from an image and the user data lifted straight out of it, which is one of the more straightforward jobs on this page.
Power supplies, backlight boards and logic boards fail on an iMac exactly as they do on any other computer, and the storage inside is not involved in any of it. The disk comes out and is read on the bench. What does not happen here is any attempt to mend the iMac, because this is a recovery laboratory and not an Apple repair shop.
From the iMac Pro onwards, and on every Apple Silicon iMac and Mac mini, the flash is soldered to the board and tied cryptographically to the processor that was fitted next to it. There is no disk to take out and no bench anywhere that can read those chips elsewhere. If the board has died, the data has gone with it, and saying so plainly is more use than a hopeful quote.
The disk is listed, the container is listed, and nothing inside it will open. That is structural damage to the file system rather than to the hardware, and the data is generally all present behind it. Work happens on an image, never on the drive that arrived, and the background to how Apple file systems fail is set out on the Mac OS X recovery page.
When macOS cannot make sense of a volume it suggests erasing as the way forward, which is reasonable advice for a disk with nothing on it and disastrous advice for one with a decade of work on it. Decline it, shut the machine down, and let somebody look at the volume before anything is written to it.
First Aid is a repair tool and repair tools write. Run once on a healthy volume with a small inconsistency it does what it should. Run repeatedly on a volume that has lost its structure, it changes the thing you were trying to preserve, and each run makes reconstruction from the original state a little less likely.
The short cable between the disk and the logic board is a known weak point on several iMac generations, and when it fails the machine behaves exactly as though the drive has died. The disk itself is fine and reads normally the moment it is on a bench port. This is one of the cases where the news is much better than the symptoms suggest.
Apple read drive temperature through a sensor lead on the original disk, so an aftermarket replacement fitted without the right adapter leaves the fan running at full speed permanently. It is a nuisance rather than a data fault, but it tells you the machine has been opened before, which is worth mentioning when you book a job in.
Plenty of iMacs from that era are still in daily use with their original drive, which by now has run for well over fifty thousand hours. They do not usually fail suddenly; they get slow, then noisy, then unreadable in that order. A disk of that age holding the only copy of anything is worth imaging while it is still merely slow.
The hardware is answering and the partition map or the container header has been damaged, so macOS can see a device and nothing inside it. That is a logical fault, it is covered by no fix, no fee, and it is one of the more recoverable states an Apple disk turns up in.
Having both drives is necessary and not always sufficient. The blade may have failed while the mechanical half is healthy, the metadata may be damaged on one side, or a repair attempt may have broken the pairing. Both are imaged, the arrangement is worked out from the copies, and the volume is rebuilt from those rather than from the originals.
An encrypted volume comes back with the password or the recovery key and does not come back without them. With one of the two it is ordinary work in the 400 pounds + VAT band. Without either, nobody anywhere can help, which is the entire purpose of the encryption. It is worth hunting for the key before paying for postage.
The backup drive mounts, the sparse bundle refuses to open, and the restore stops part way through. A Time Machine volume is an ordinary file system with an unusual structure laid over it, and a damaged one can generally be taken apart and read directly rather than through the restore interface that is refusing to cooperate.
Moving to a new Mac copies an account across, and where it goes wrong it copies part of one, or creates a second account and leaves the original where it was. Almost always the data is still on the old machine's disk in full. Stop using the old iMac and have its drive read rather than trying the migration a second time.
An iMac passed down the family gets wiped first, and a fortnight later somebody realises what was on it. On a spinning disk an erase leaves the great majority of the data physically present and a good recovery is likely. On a blade or an SSD the honest answer is usually shorter. Either way, stop using the machine immediately.
Vases, radiators above the desk and open windows in a storm all end the same way. Liquid runs down inside the aluminium and sits on the boards, and corrosion continues for weeks afterwards. The disk is generally the least affected component in there, and it is removed and read rather than the machine being dried out and tried.
An iMac with a dead fan does not always announce it, and the disk sits in a sealed case with nowhere for the heat to go. Drives that have run twenty degrees over their rating develop read errors well before they make any noise. If the machine has been unusually hot to the touch for months, that is part of the history worth writing on the note in the box.
The thinner iMacs moved to notebook-sized disks, which are slower and less tolerant than the 3.5-inch drives in the larger machines, and they were frequently paired with a small blade as a Fusion set. Getting one out is a display removal job. The disk itself is ordinary once it is free of the chassis and is priced no differently.
Pre-2006 machines and the Power Mac towers before them used interfaces that no modern computer has a port for, and their disks are read here with period adapters. Photographs, project archives and old accounts come off these regularly. Age is not by itself a reason to expect a poor result.
Consumer tools scan by reading the whole disk repeatedly, which is the last thing a failing mechanism needs, and several of them write their working files onto the volume being scanned. If one has already been run, say so on the booking form. It rarely rules out a recovery and it always changes the order the work is done in.
The mini shares the iMac's storage arrangements generation for generation: SATA disks in the older ones, blades and Fusion pairs in the middle years, soldered flash in the current ones. It has the considerable advantage of opening without a display coming off, and its drive is priced exactly as any other single drive.
Somebody has taken the disk out, put it in a USB enclosure and found gibberish. That usually means it was half of a Fusion pair or part of a CoreStorage volume, so it is only a portion of a larger structure. It is not damage and it is not the end of it. Send both halves, labelled, and the structure is reassembled from images.
Apple machines are targeted less often than Windows ones and they are not exempt. The disk hardware is normally fine, and what returns depends on the strain involved, on whether any snapshots came through it, and on how much has been saved to the volume since. Charging follows the ordinary media bands at 300 pounds + VAT for a single drive, and nobody rebadges it as forensic work.
Design and video work around Leamington and Warwick tends to spread a job across an iMac and one or two external volumes, and it is generally an external that fails first because it gets carried about. Say which drives were involved when you book in, because a project reassembled from one of three volumes is not a finished project.
A working iMac being replaced, with fifteen years of photographs, scanned paperwork and correspondence on the disk and no backup that has run recently. The drive comes out, the contents come off, and they go back on fresh media. It is the cheapest job on this page and the one most often put off until something breaks.
This is the detail that costs people most when it is missed. Fusion presents a small SSD and a large hard disk as a single volume, and neither component means anything by itself: the SSD holds recently used blocks, the disk holds the remainder, and the map connecting the two is spread across both. So a Fusion iMac that has stopped needs both drives to travel, each labelled so it is obvious which is which. Post one half and there is nothing to rebuild from, whatever condition it turns out to be in. It also means that neither half should be wiped, reformatted or turned into a volume of its own while trying to get the machine going again, because that removes the very metadata a reconstruction is built from. Oxford's shipping form lists a Fusion Mac among its named exceptions for exactly that reason. The pair is treated as one job at £300 + VAT rather than billed twice, and the rebuild is done against read-only copies of both members, never against the drives you sent.
An iMac is a big, fragile object built around a small piece of storage, and the glass front makes it about the worst thing anybody could hand to a courier. The storage comes out; the machine stays on your desk. Getting into one takes more patience than a tower and wants a plastic tool rather than force, so if the panel is resisting, ring before something cracks. That holds until the point where Apple stopped fitting storage that can be separated: from the 2017 generation on the Intel side, and on every Apple Silicon machine, the flash is fixed to the logic board and nothing can be done with it. A T2 chip or an M-series processor means the answer is no, and that is better heard before the postage is paid. Everything older — SATA disks, Fusion pairs, Apple's own blades — runs through in the ordinary way at the ordinary figure, with a FileVault volume at £400 + VAT because encrypted disks sit in a band of their own.
What travels from an iMac is the storage, and once it is here it joins the same queue as everything else. These are the six things an Apple desktop job normally needs, and the first two are the ones that make it different from a Windows machine.
HFS+ catalogues and APFS containers are reconstructed from a copy rather than repaired in place, and snapshot history is used wherever it survives. The volume that arrived is never written to, which is the difference between this and running First Aid one more time.
CoreStorage and Fusion sets are reassembled from images of both members once the mapping between them has been established. Where the small blade holds the metadata and the large disk holds the bulk of the data, both are imaged before anything is assumed about how they fit together.
The 3.5-inch disks in older iMacs fail in the ordinary mechanical ways and are opened under filtered air for head replacement or spindle work. Donor parts are matched by firmware family, and that work takes 50% up front because the parts are bought for your drive specifically.
Atola and DeepSpar hardware with per-head passes, hardware timeouts and current monitoring. A tired Apple disk gives up its cooperative regions first and its difficult ones last, which produces a fuller image than any single sequential attempt ever does.
Apple used several proprietary blade pinouts across the 2012 to 2017 machines and none of them fits a standard M.2 socket. The adapters for each are on the bench, along with SATA and PATA for the older desktops, so a drive that fits nothing you own generally fits something here.
Where FileVault is in use and the password or recovery key is available, the image is unlocked and worked on as a decrypted copy. The original drive is never modified. Without the key or the password there is no way in for anybody, and that is said at the diagnostic stage rather than later.
It is the disk that goes in the post, not the computer. An iMac is a big awkward object wrapped around a small one, the display has been stuck down with adhesive on every model built since 2012, and a screen in transit is a screen that arrives in pieces. Any Apple repair shop will lift the panel and free the drive in a few minutes for anyone who does not fancy the job. On a Fusion machine both devices come out and both want labelling, because half a Fusion set carries no meaning on its own and the volume cannot be put back together from it. One drive or SSD is 300 pounds + VAT, and a Fusion pair counts as a single job rather than two. A FileVault or otherwise encrypted volume moves to 400 pounds + VAT and needs the password or the recovery key. The free examination closes two working days after the parcel is logged in. Flash soldered to a logic board, meaning every Apple Silicon machine and the Intel models carrying a T2, is beyond what any bench can reach, and that gets said before you spend anything on postage. No phone or tablet of any make is taken here, iPads very much included.
Almost everything worked on here arrived in the post. A drive that is already in trouble has an easier time boxed, padded and insured than it does being carried round in a bag for an afternoon, and a parcel handed over in Coventry today is normally booked in at Oxford tomorrow morning.
As a rule the storage comes out and the machine stays where it is. That applies to a laptop, a tower, an iMac and to the recorder sitting under a counter. Taking equipment apart is not something this bench does, and a repair shop will free a drive in a few minutes. Two things go the other way: an external drive stays sealed inside its own case, and a NAS travels as a complete unit with its disks still in their bays. A Fusion Mac is a third case — both of its drives come out and travel together, each one labelled. The single situation nobody can work around is memory soldered flat onto a mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon Macs and a good many slim laptops are built: if the storage will not unbolt, there is no parcel to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Put Oxford Data Recovery on the label. From Coventry it is roughly fifty-five miles straight down the M40, about an hour if you would rather drive it in than post it. Either way you are told the moment it is logged, and the free diagnostic finishes two working days later.
Unsure what ought to go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it do the asking.
Looking at it costs nothing, one written figure follows, and the band governing this page is £300 + VAT for one hard disk or SSD, an NVMe blade counting as a single drive.