Devices · Mac and MacBook
A Mac puts up three obstacles a Windows box does not. The volume is already encrypted when you unbox it. The flash is soldered to the board on most models. On a Fusion machine, one volume sits across two separate disks. Consumer software stops dead at the first of those. Send it in from Cardiff or anywhere in South Wales, tell us the password, and the rest is bench work.
Describe the symptoms to an engineer
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| What shows up | What has gone wrong | Do this now |
|---|---|---|
| A folder with a question mark, blinking | The Mac can find no startup disk at all | Do not restart it — test the disk |
| At start-up, a circle with a slash through it | macOS is present but refuses to load | Check the disk, then the container |
| First Aid reports errors and stops there | APFS damage past Disk Utility's reach | Take an image, then decide |
| com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error -119930868 | The APFS volume refuses to mount | Nearly always recoverable off a clone |
| In Disk Utility: File system verify or repair failed (-69845) | macOS has run out of options | Power it down and stop |
| Looping at boot ever since a macOS update | Firmware or container harm; the data below is fine | Normally recoverable |
The diagnosis costs you nothing. Every item that arrives is logged under a case number of its own, and an engineer works out what has actually failed — then tells you plainly which files can come back and which cannot. The price follows that: one fixed figure, in writing, and no work begins until you have read it and said go ahead.
FileVault, a T2 chip, the Secure Enclave on Apple silicon — whichever one holds the key, what sits beneath it is ciphertext and nothing else. Give us the password and the job turns ordinary. It opens with an image made so that it can still be decrypted later.
If the disk comes out, it gets imaged like any other. Where the flash is soldered, or the board itself has died, the job moves down to component level. Those memory chips carry on reading long after the Mac has given up starting.
On a Fusion iMac, the front half of a document can sit on the SSD and the back half on the hard disk. We image each one, then work out the CoreStorage or APFS layout that ties them together. What goes home with you is finished files, not the halves they were kept in.
Nothing is billed while you are still deciding. A complete listing of what came off the drive reaches you first, and the invoice only follows your yes. Files travel back on media bought new for the job, return postage ours, and we do not close it here until every one of them opens on the machine you will use.
On the numbers: Apple publishes no model-by-model figures, and soldered Mac flash never turns up in a public failure study, Backblaze's included. Any site handing you a firm 'MacBook failure rate' invented it. That data exists nowhere outside Apple.
The verdict from the Apple Store was that the iMac was beyond help. What sat inside was a Fusion Drive: an SSD and a spinning disk that the Mac shows you as a single volume. The spinning half was failing. Both were imaged separately, the mapping that ties them together was rebuilt, and a design studio got a decade of its files back.
Yes, it is. FileVault, the T2 chip and the Secure Enclave on an M-series machine all encrypt the volume, and only your login password or the recovery key will undo that. Without one of the two, nobody reads the contents — no lab anywhere, this one included.
Rarely. You put a recovery question to a repair service, and they answered as repairers. Their fix is a new logic board, and the old one leaves the building with your files still on it. Reading that storage is a different trade, done on a different bench.
The single icon in the Finder is bookkeeping, not hardware. Underneath sit two disks — a small SSD and a slower hard disk — and one file can hold blocks on both. Bring us half the pair and you get fragments. We copy the two, then rebuild the map that joins them.
Usually, yes — it becomes board-level work. Given the password, and an encryption chain that has not been broken, those chips can be read where they sit. What does not work is lifting the flash off the board and trying to read it on its own.
A failing drive has only so many starts left in it. Spend none of them. Keep the power off, and the free diagnosis will tell you what is still readable.