Apple machines · job record · NTG-2025-2260
Ten Years of Files, and Not a Spare in the Country.
Grey screen first, then a question-mark folder blinking away, and that was the end of the machine. What the shop told her was accurate enough: we fit parts, we don't read them
. Components for a 2011 MacBook Pro have not been on anyone's shelf in years. From a back bedroom in Ilkeston she had run a letting agency for a decade across the DE7 streets round about, and that disk carried a photograph of every property that ever went on our books
, and all the tenancy agreements from day one
besides. Not a byte of it existed anywhere else.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
0115 8220606
What went wrong, and why.
Age counted both ways on this one. Spares for a drive of that generation went off the market long since, and telephoning around does not bring them back. Magnetism, on the other hand, never runs out: what went onto those platters is lying there still, and one well-planned run through a working mechanism will usually fetch it back. The shop was being straight with her, not unhelpful. Naming a fault, then selling the part that cures it, is what that trade does, and she got exactly that. Getting data off a mechanism that will not turn is a different business altogether: donor stock, filtered air, and imaging equipment nobody keeps behind a counter. Drives of this age tend to permit one attempt and to charge for the next, which puts the whole job on getting that first one right.
The bench work this one took.
How the work runs →| Kit on the bench | What it did on this job | Why we reach for it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Donor stack fitted, heads graded, sound surfaces taken ahead of the rest | One platter side per pass, with the heads mapped before a single sector is taken off, and the resets, the timeouts and the power all held under our control |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Read rate kept low, since a mechanism of that age has little to spare | Reads through the drive's own firmware and controller instead of working round them |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | HFS+ volume rebuilt off the image, structure and dates as recorded | Reads APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs where other tools give up |
What happened on the bench.
Survey first, before a single thing is moved
Establishing that the heads had gone was a few minutes' work. The survey was finished off anyway: bearings, surface condition, a decade of defect entries off a disk that had worked warm all its life, parked beneath a printer on a small office desk. Everything said the same thing, which was go carefully. Curiosity got no power applied to it and no step was taken on instinct. Whatever running time the mechanism had left was going to be budgeted on paper before any of it was spent.
Matching the label is not matching the donor
Since nowhere stocks this vintage, a donor has to be tracked down, and ours was already on the shelf. A matching label gets you started and no further: family, firmware generation and the preamp all have to line up. Laminar flow, new stack on, and the disk turned again — not evenly, one head behind the rest from the opening pass.
Go light on the drive, do the rest on the image
Passes ran at a rate deliberately set low. The suspect head came last and was rested between turns, and what lay behind its lag turned out to be contact damage across one narrow band. Everything from there onwards happened on the image, and nothing on the drive. What emerged was a genuine HFS+ volume — one folder per property, dates as originally recorded — instead of a heap of numbered files.
What was returned.
A decade of tenancy paperwork and a decade of property photography went home checked, filed as she files them, opening as they should. The exception is a handful of images that had been sitting on the worst of the surfaces. None of them was quietly dropped: each appears in the report by filename, and nearly all are exterior shots she is free to go and take again. Out it went on a fresh disk, a duplicate beside it. The MacBook has gone in a drawer, done with.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
Other Apple jobs in the casebook.
Sounds like yours? Switch it off before anything else.
£250 + VAT covers a card or a USB stick; a single drive is £300 + VAT; RAID and NAS start from £500 + VAT. Nothing is charged for the first look, and a fixed figure reaches you in writing before any chargeable work begins. Switch the device off, leave it alone, and post it in. On most jobs, no data back means no fee.