Apple products are known not only for their design but also for their speed. It is probably no secret that SSD drives are significantly faster than HDDs, but their price is also considerably higher. iMac users have the option to use what is called Fusion Drive functionality. Fusion Drive is a combination of SSD and HDD, most commonly using a small-capacity 128-256GB SSD paired with a 1-2TB HDD. This way, it ensures both high speed and large storage capacity.

For data recovery, we received an iMac with the mentioned disk configuration. During diagnostics, a failure of the HDD read/write head assembly was detected. After replacing it with a donor part, 84.647% of the data was recovered; however, it was not possible to access the folders and files. To retrieve the files, the SSD and HDD need to be combined into a Fusion Drive. Since only 84.647% of the HDD data was recovered, a significant portion of the work had to be done manually (searching for logical gaps).

Two days of specialist work yielded results: the disk images were merged, and the user’s data was restored to its original form with the complete folder structure intact.

P.S. We recover NTFS, NTFS5, ReFS, FAT12/16/32, exFAT, HFS/HFS+, APFS, UFS1/UFS2, and Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 file system partitions and individual files from these partitions. We also recover individual files from other “exotic” partitions.