Devices · Macs and MacBooks
A Mac holds you off in three ways a plain PC does not: the volume is encrypted before you first switch the machine on, the flash is usually soldered to the logic board, and a Fusion model lays one volume over two disks. Shop-bought software falls at the first of those. Post it in from anywhere in Birmingham with the password and the other two are ours to solve.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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| What you see | What is behind it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A flashing folder with a question mark on it | There is no startup disk the Mac can see | Keep it off and test the disk |
| The no-entry symbol on the start-up screen | macOS is on there but will not start | Look at the disk and its container |
| First Aid finds faults it cannot fix | APFS damage beyond what Disk Utility does | Image it first, then act |
| com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error -119930868 | The APFS volume will not mount | Usually recoverable from an image |
| Disk Utility First Aid: file system verify or repair failed (-69845) | macOS cannot go any further | Believe it and shut down |
| Stuck in a boot loop since the last update | Firmware or container damage over sound data | Usually recoverable |
Every item gets a case number of its own the day it lands. An engineer then works out what has actually failed and tells you plainly which files have a real chance of coming back and which do not. Only then does a price follow: one figure, fixed, in writing, and it costs you nothing to see it. Nothing is charged until you say yes.
FileVault, a T2 chip or the Secure Enclave in an M-series machine: whichever is holding the lock, everything under it is ciphertext. Hand over the password and this becomes a routine case, opening with an image taken so that it can still be decrypted afterwards.
Where a disk lifts out, it is imaged the usual way. Soldered flash, or a board that has died, drops the job to component level — and those memory chips keep reading long after the Mac itself has stopped starting up.
On a Fusion machine, half a document may live on the SSD and the rest of it on the spinning disk. Each is imaged in turn, then the CoreStorage or APFS layout that joins the two is worked back out, so what goes home with you is whole files rather than pieces of them.
No invoice is raised until the full list of recovered files has sat in front of you and you have said go ahead. Your data comes back on media we buy new, posted at our expense, and the job is not closed here until every file has opened on your own machine.
About the statistics: Apple publishes nothing model by model, and soldered Mac storage falls outside every public failure study going, Backblaze's included. Any site quoting you a firm 'MacBook failure rate' made the number up. Nobody outside Cupertino holds that data.
An Apple Store had already declared the machine finished. Inside sat a Fusion Drive — an SSD and a hard disk presented to you as one volume — and the hard disk was on its way out. Each half was imaged, the map that joins them was put back together, and a decade of one design studio's work came off it.
Yes. Where FileVault, a T2 chip or an M-series Mac is doing the locking, it takes either your login password or the recovery key to turn ciphertext back into files. With neither of those, the encryption stands up to every lab in the trade, this one no exception.
Not usually, because you asked a repairer a recovery question. Apple's route is to fit a replacement board and hand back a working Mac; anything held on the old one goes out of the door with it. Whether that storage can still be read is a separate job.
Because what shows up in the Finder is an accounting layer draped over two real disks: a small SSD and a slower spinning one. Any document can have blocks on either, so one disk alone gives you fragments. We image both and rebuild the map.
Generally yes, though the work drops to board level. Given the password, and an encryption chain still in one piece, soldered flash gives up its contents where it sits; what fails is any attempt to take that chip off the board and read it alone.
Every extra power-up takes something off a drive that is already going. Leave it switched off and let the free diagnosis say what still reads.