Apple machines · job record · RDG-2025-2260
Ten Years of Records, and Not a Spare to Be Had.
The machine gave her a grey screen, then a question-mark folder blinking at her, and that was that. What the shop said was accurate: we fit parts, we don't read them
. Nobody has stocked components for a 2011 MacBook Pro in years. For ten years she had run a letting agency from a back bedroom in Caversham, covering the streets around it, and the disk held a photo of every property we have ever listed
plus all the tenancy agreements from day one
. Nowhere else held any of it.
Same fault on yours? Tell us what it is doing.
0800 6890668
What actually caused it.
Age cut both ways here. Components for a drive of that vintage left the shelves long ago, and no amount of telephoning changes that. Magnetism does not go out of stock, though: everything ever written to those platters remains on them, and one carefully planned run through a working mechanism will usually retrieve it. So the counter was not being obstructive — it was being straight with her. Its trade is identifying a fault and selling the part that fixes it, and that is what she got. Extracting data from a mechanism that no longer turns is a separate business altogether: donor stock, filtered air, imaging equipment no shop would own. Drives this old often allow one attempt and charge for the next, so everything hangs on the first one being right.
What this one needed on the bench.
How every job runs →| Bench tools | Its part in this job | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Donor stack fitted, then every head graded and the sound surfaces taken first | It maps the heads before anything is taken off, keeps to one platter side per pass, and stays in charge of the resets, the timeouts and the power |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Kept the rate low, because a mechanism of that age will not take much | Copies at firmware level, through the drive's own controller rather than around it |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | HFS+ volume reconstructed from the image, dates and structure unchanged | Opens volumes other tools refuse: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs |
What the bench did.
Survey it before anything gets moved
Confirming that the heads had gone took a few minutes, and the survey was completed regardless. Bearings, surface condition, and a decade of defect entries from a disk that had spent its working life warm, sitting under a printer on a small office desk. It all pointed the same way: go carefully. No power was applied out of curiosity, and no step taken on instinct. However much running the mechanism had left, it would be budgeted on paper before a minute of it went anywhere.
The donor had to match more than a label
Nowhere stocks parts of this vintage, so a donor has to be hunted, and ours came off our own shelf. Matching labels are only the start: family, firmware generation and preamp all have to agree. Under laminar flow the stack went on, and the disk turned once more — unevenly, with one head trailing the others from the opening pass.
Light passes on the drive, all the rest on the image
Imaging went in passes at a deliberately low rate. The suspect head was left until last and rested between turns, and the reason for its lag proved to be contact damage in one narrow band. After that, every remaining operation happened on the image and none on the drive. What emerged was a proper HFS+ volume, a folder for each property, carrying the dates originally recorded, instead of a bin of numbered files.
What went back.
Ten years of tenancy paperwork and ten years of property photographs went back verified, in her own filing order and opening as they should — apart from a handful of images that sat on the worst of the surfaces. Each of those is listed in the report under its own filename rather than being quietly dropped, and nearly all are exterior views she can go out and take again. The lot went out on a fresh disk with a duplicate beside it. The MacBook itself is in a drawer, done with.
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Post it in as it is, switched off. Looking costs nothing, and you get one fixed figure in writing before any chargeable work begins — £250 + VAT for a card or stick, £300 + VAT for a single drive, from £500 + VAT for RAID and NAS. On most jobs, nothing is charged unless your data comes back.