A MacBook freezing so often it had become unusable, with a startup disk that came and went. Apple diagnosed the drive correctly and then did the thing people do not expect: told the owner they do not recover data, and pointed them elsewhere.
A MacBook had become progressively unusable — freezing at random, needing hard restarts several times a day, and occasionally failing to find its startup disk at all. The owner took it to an Apple Store, where the Genius Bar confirmed the hard drive was failing.
What happened next surprises people, and it should not. Apple diagnosed the fault accurately and told the owner plainly that they do not offer data recovery — their remedy is a replacement drive, which returns a working machine and none of the contents. The owner was referred on to us. On the drive were Time Machine backups, personal documents and photographs, with no copy anywhere else.
The drive was mechanically sound — still spinning, no clicking, no grinding. What it had was bad sectors in the thousands, spread widely enough that macOS was stalling every time it touched one, which is exactly what the freezing had been. A read that fails is retried by the drive many times before it gives up, and the system simply waits.
The file system had suffered as a result. Time Machine stores backups as a structure of hard links rather than as discrete copies, so damage to that structure affects far more than the blocks physically involved — a broken link tree can make thousands of files unreachable while their contents sit perfectly intact.
Nothing was repaired in place. Running Disk Utility's First Aid on a drive shedding sectors is a repair operation on failing hardware, and it resolves what it cannot read by discarding — on a Time Machine volume that means losing the link structure that makes the backups navigable.
The drive was imaged instead, in graduated passes: a fast sweep with retries disabled to bank everything that read immediately, then repeated passes over the gaps with longer timeouts, the drive rested between them. From the completed image the HFS+ structures were rebuilt, the partition information restored, and the Time Machine hard-link tree reconstructed so the snapshots were browsable rather than merely present as a mass of unlinked blocks.
Snapshots were checked by opening them — a Time Machine backup that lists but cannot be traversed is not a backup. Documents and photographs were verified by rendering rather than counting, and the recovered set was returned on an external SSD so the owner could restore to a new machine directly.
Everything came back, including the full backup history. The MacBook itself went on for a replacement drive, which is what Apple had recommended in the first place — and was the right advice, once the contents were safe.
The sequence is the part worth keeping. Recovery first, repair second. Had the drive been replaced at the Apple Store before the data came off it, the machine would have come back working and the backups would have gone with the old disk.
The Genius Bar is good at identifying a failing drive and will say so. What follows is a replacement, which returns a working Mac and none of your files. If the contents matter, get the data off first and have the machine repaired afterwards. Where a Mac’s drive lifts out, recovery is from £300 +VAT; a Fusion Drive is £550 +VAT flat. Storage soldered to the logic board is not a service we offer.
Get the device to us for a free diagnostic and a quick note on what went wrong — an engineer looks it over and puts your exact quote in writing before anything is started.
The route to your data starts with the device reaching us. Box it up securely, tuck your contact details inside, and send it across — after the free diagnostic, we put your exact price in writing before a single step is taken.
Sending it by post? Go with a tracked, insured service. Prefer to bring it round? Our door is open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm — just pack the device as described above beforehand.
Prefer to get a sense of things first? Complete the form with a bit more about the fault and an engineer will look it over and send back a tailored quote.
We’ll get back to you soon. Anything pressing, call 01865 593000.
No — Apple diagnoses and replaces hardware. The Genius Bar will often identify a failing drive accurately and then tell you they do not offer recovery, because their remedy is a new drive. That returns a working machine without your files.
Possibly. Freezing that clears after a restart, a startup disk that comes and goes, and long unresponsive pauses during ordinary work all describe a drive retrying unreadable sectors. Each retry stalls the system while it waits.
Yes, though they need care. Time Machine stores snapshots as a structure of hard links rather than separate copies, so damage to that structure can make thousands of files unreachable even though the contents are intact. The link tree has to be rebuilt, not just the files.
Not on a drive shedding sectors. First Aid is a repair operation on failing hardware, and it resolves what it cannot read by discarding — on a Time Machine volume that means losing the structure that makes the backups navigable.
From £300 plus VAT where the drive lifts out, and £550 plus VAT flat for a Fusion Drive. Soldered storage on a failed logic board is not something we take on, and we say so at the free diagnostic.
Kick off with an instant online quote, or ring us and talk it through first. Either way you’ll know a clear, fixed price before any work starts.