iMac and Mac Pro hard drive crash recovery
Many iMacs from 2012 to 2019 and older Mac Pro towers use spinning hard drives that are now well past their design life. Clicking, grinding and endless beachballs are the warning signs.
Why these drives fail
iMac hard drives run hot behind the display, and many have now worked for a decade or more. Read/write heads wear, motors stall and surface damage spreads. Older Mac Pro towers often hold several drives, sometimes set up as a RAID or with separate Time Machine disks.
Some iMacs combine the hard drive with a small SSD as a Fusion Drive – in that case we recover both together.
How we recover it
We remove the drive and image it on hardware imagers that handle unstable media. Drives with failed heads or motors are opened only in clean-room conditions for component replacement. For Mac Pro arrays we image every member disk and rebuild the RAID or volume set virtually.
What it costs
Every job starts with a professional evaluation (£94.80). You then get a fixed quote and a list of recoverable files before any recovery work is charged. As a guide, logical faults start in our £250–£550 band; mechanical failures needing clean-room work usually fall between £650 and £1,200.
Frequently asked questions
My iMac drive is clicking. Can I keep using it to copy files off?
Switch it off. Every minute of clicking can damage the platters further and reduce what can be recovered.
Do you need the whole iMac?
Bringing the whole iMac lets us check for a Fusion Drive and the right configuration. We remove the drive ourselves.
Can you recover a Mac Pro with several drives?
Yes. We image each drive and rebuild RAID or separate volumes, so label any drives you have already removed.
Related services
macOS Corruption & Failed UpdatesBoot loops, stuck updates and corrupted APFS volumes.
Deleted or Formatted Mac FilesEmptied Trash, erased disks and accidental reformats.
Mac SSD & Fusion Drive FailureFusion Drive, Apple blade SSD and soldered storage failures.
MacBook Liquid DamageCoffee, water and drink spills on MacBook Air and Pro.
Mac Not Powering On or BootingDead Macs, black screens and boot failures.
FileVault-Encrypted Mac RecoveryFailed encrypted Mac drives, unlocked with your credentials.
Mac Logic Board & NAND DamageBoard-level repair to reach soldered, encrypted Mac storage.
Talk to an engineer
Describe the problem and the make and model if you know it. We will reply with a price and the fastest way to get it fixed, usually the same working day.
020 7237 6805 London repair centreUnit 1, 80 Willow Walk, London SE1 5SY
Monday to Saturday, 9am–6pm
Ready to send it in? Book online and get your job number by email straight away.