2017 iMac Fusion Drive Death - Full HD Cost to Return Broken Drive

[rnodern]

2017 27" i7 3TB iMac.

Fusion drive died on Christmas eve. Bummer. Call up Apple to organise a repair. Explicitly mention that I need to perform data forensics on the drive due to some critical things stored on my Windows partition.

Take it into Apple store, again explicitly advised the genius that I must have the hard drive back to perform data forensics to try to recover some critical data on my windows partition. Everything all good.

Pick up my iMac today. $462 parts and labor (Ouch). When i ask about my old broken hard drive, they said they won't give it back. So I complain. The manager comes out and says that I will need to be charged for that part "because you'll be leaving with two hard drives".. Yeah, both drives I have paid for. Not to mention the critical data that I want to attempt to recover

Call up Apple and got nothing. Can't even raise a complaint. Refuses to explain to me why Apple won't give my drive back.

Why would Apple not return my drive? Extremely disappointing that they didn't mention this until I went in to pickup the repaired iMac considering I was overly transparent with what I needed to do.

 

[DeltaMac]

Apple repair parts are normally exchange parts. The new part is an exchange, and the old part has to be returned to Apple for that price. It's too bad that the Apple Store could not have communicated that a bit better. In the old days (when I worked as an Apple-certified tech in an Apple Specialist - before there was such a thing as an Apple Store), it was a policy in our store to suggest that data recovery should be done before the repair, but that did not always work out, particularly if the drive needed to be sent out to a data recovery service. We would charge the customer if the old drive needed to be retained for data recovery (which is the second part, making the repair a replacement, not an exchange.

 

[Nermal]

Demand it back. You paid full price for the original drive when you bought the computer in 2017. It's yours, and Apple's policies don't change that.

Edit: Re-reading your post, can you clarify? You said that Apple wants to charge you for the new drive, but you also said that Apple won't give the drive back. Were you able to pay for it at all or did that option "disappear" further down the line?

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

OP should have taken the drive to data recovery service from the first step, shouldn't he?
And while at the data recovery service, as the iMac was opened, replacing it with an SSD would be a hell of a job and they would charge him more for labor?

 

[Fishrrman]

I would NOT have paid nearly $500 to replace the drive in a 2017 iMac.
Not worth it.

This is what BACKUPS are for.
(I realize that with a bootcamp partition, a separate Windows-based backup utility is required. Probably better to always go with a "virtual machine" solution, because that gets backed up as a part of a "Mac backup" app).

Fusion drives are likely to fail sooner than "other" drives, and the 3tb version seems "the likeliest of all". We're going to be seeing lots of posts like this in the future.

OP:
You're not getting that drive back.
Where's the backup?

 

[macguru9999]

I have the same job in front of me now. I have recovered the owner's data BEFORE removal of the spinner. I am replacing the spinner with a smaller sata SSD as he does not need 3.12 TB. I will just disable the mobo pcie ssd as he will not need it. Data recovery AFTER removal requires removal of this component and recovery from both parts. As they have reinitialised a fusion drive reusing the ssd, presumably, all your data is lost as the 3tb spinner is not the whole volume.

 

[macguru9999]

I have the same job in front of me now. I have recovered the owner's data BEFORE removal of the spinner. I am replacing the spinner with a smaller sata SSD as he does not need 3.12 TB. I will just disable the mobo pcie ssd as he will not need it. Data recovery AFTER removal requires removal of this component and recovery from both parts. As they have reinitialised a fusion drive reusing the pcie ssd, presumably, and a new spinner, all your data is lost as the 3tb spinner is not the whole volume. Apple do not do data recovery, as a rule.

 

[Fishrrman]

macguru wrote:
"Data recovery AFTER removal requires removal of this component and recovery from both parts. As they have reinitialised a fusion drive reusing the ssd, presumably, all your data is lost as the 3tb spinner is not the whole volume."

I'll reckon you have experience in data recovery from fusion drives.
Thus, the questions:
Is it possible to recovery data from ONLY ONE "half" of a fusion drive?
Do tools exist for this?

Or is it always like you mentioned -- that to recover data from a fusion drive setup, one needs BOTH [previously-fused] drives from which to get it?

The OP mentioned that he had [what I think is] a bootcamp partition on the failed 3tb drive.
IF one had that drive "in hand", doesn't the bootcamp partition "exist outside of" the fusion scheme, and thus... might be "accessible" on its own?

 

[DeltaMac]

I think the bootcamp partition on a fusion drive is only on the spinning hard drive.
but, for OP, it's probably a moot point, when the Apple Store would almost certainly have already returned an exchange part.

 

[macguru9999]

macguru wrote:
"Data recovery AFTER removal requires removal of this component and recovery from both parts. As they have reinitialised a fusion drive reusing the ssd, presumably, all your data is lost as the 3tb spinner is not the whole volume."

I'll reckon you have experience in data recovery from fusion drives.
Thus, the questions:
Is it possible to recovery data from ONLY ONE "half" of a fusion drive?
Do tools exist for this?

The partition map is not readable from the finder unless you have both halves. They would already have erased the mobo ssd. There MIGHT be a way of getting stuff off the spinner but I have not employed data specialists much in the past because they charge about $1000. I have been able to remove the ssd, and mount it with the spinner on another mac, but its too late for that here.