Devices · MacBooks and Macs
A Mac fails differently to a PC. The volume was encrypted before you ever switched it on. On most models the flash is soldered to the logic board. On a Fusion iMac, one volume is spread over two separate disks. Software you can download quits at the first of those three. Post it in from Hull or anywhere in the East Riding, send the password with it, and none of the three is a problem here.
An engineer will take the details
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| What you see | What the fault is | What to try |
|---|---|---|
| A flashing folder with a question mark | No startup disk can be found at all | Leave it off; get the disk tested |
| At start-up, a crossed-out circle appears | macOS is there and will not load | Test the disk, then the container |
| First Aid finds errors and gives up | APFS damage Disk Utility cannot mend | Image it first, decide after |
| com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error -119930868 | The APFS volume will not mount | Usually recovered from a clone |
| Disk Utility says: File system verify or repair failed (-69845) | macOS has nothing left to try | Switch it off and leave it |
| Stuck in a boot loop since a macOS update | Firmware or container damage; the files below are fine | Usually comes back |
Each item that arrives gets a case number the day it lands. An engineer looks at it and finds the real fault, and that costs you nothing. You are told in plain terms which files can come off the drive and which cannot. A price follows — one figure, written down. No work starts until you have seen it and agreed to it.
Whichever one holds the key — FileVault, the T2 chip, or the Secure Enclave in Apple silicon — what lies beneath it is ciphertext. Send the password and this becomes an ordinary job. The image is made in a form that will still decrypt later.
A disk that unscrews is imaged like anything else. Where the flash is soldered on, or the board has died, the work drops to component level. Those chips go on giving up their contents long after the machine stopped switching on.
On a Fusion iMac the start of a document can live on the SSD and the end of it on the hard disk. Each drive is imaged on its own, then the CoreStorage or APFS layout that binds them is worked out. You get whole files back, not the pieces they were stored in.
You are not billed while you are still thinking. The list of what came off the drive goes to you first, and the invoice waits on your word. Files go home on media bought in for the job, with the postage back on us. We keep the job open until you have opened them on your own machine.
On the numbers: Apple releases nothing model by model, and soldered Mac flash appears in no public failure study, Backblaze's included. Nobody can honestly print a 'MacBook failure rate'. Those numbers sit with Apple and nowhere else.
The Apple Store had already told the owner the iMac was finished. Fitted inside was a Fusion Drive: flash storage plus a mechanical disk, which macOS reports as one volume. The mechanical part was dying. Each was imaged on its own, and rebuilding the mapping that pairs them gave a design studio ten years of files back.
Yes. The volume is encrypted by FileVault, by the T2 chip, or by the Secure Enclave on an M-series machine, and the only things that undo that are your login password and your recovery key. Without one of them nothing can be read — not on this bench, and not anywhere else.
Usually not. You asked a repair shop a recovery question and got a repairer's answer. Their remedy is a replacement logic board. The old board leaves the shop with your files still sitting on it. Lifting those files off is a separate job, done on other equipment.
One icon in the Finder, two disks underneath: a small SSD and a slower mechanical drive. A single file can hold blocks on either of them. Send half a pair and fragments are all you get. Both are imaged, then the map that links them is rebuilt.
Most of the time, yes. It turns into board-level work. With the password, and with the encryption chain intact, the chips are read while still fitted. Taking the flash off the board and reading it alone is the one approach that fails.
Leave it switched off. A failing drive has a limited number of starts in it, and each one spends a little more. The free diagnosis will say which files can be read.