Faulty LogicBoard, gone Fusion drive data ?

[martin900]

Hello and good day to everyone.

I'm sorry to write my first post here in tragic circumstances but so it is:
- My IMac 27" stopped working and wouldn't turn on
- Repair service center says that the logic board has to be replaced
- Repair service center says there's no hope to recover the data in the Fusion drives (HDD + SDD), even when they are still healthy disks.

I don't want to give up on that precious data inside my Fusion drives as fast as my Repair Center, but at the same time I find very difficult to gather information about what I have to do. Any advice will be very very appreciated.

My experience in recovering data from disks is limited, and my experience in rebuilding Fusion drives is zero, but if I had enough information I guess I would go for:

- Remove both hard drives and clone both of them (I already told the Center to handle me both hard drives before changing the logic board, and I guess that cloning them won't be much of a problem)
- Run recovery data software on the images (?)
- Try to rebuild the Fusion drive with the images (?)

But, really, I don't have any idea about if this will work. I would be glad to have some help before messing around with things.

Best regards

 

[Fishrrman]

For all practical purposes, the data on those drives is probably gone.
Unrecoverable.

It -might have- been recoverable if it was only a -single- drive, and NOT a fusion drive.
This is because the "fusion" drive is "created in software", and the loss of either drive results in the loss of both. With fusion, blocks of data are shuffled around between the SSD portion and the HDD portion, making recovery difficult.

If I was in your position, I'd get the drives "handed back to me as-is".

Then I'd get whatever enclosures or connectors necessary, and connect them both to the [repaired] Mac, and try to boot from it that way (although I don't know how one would get two fused drives to even "show up" in the Mac's startup manager, it's probably not possible).

I doubt data recovery software can "touch" one drive from a fused pair.
ProSoft -- the publisher of "DataRescue" -- might know if it's possible.

Another approach might be to re-initialize the drives separately, then see if data recovery software could find anything on either one. But I wouldn't be optimistic that would work, at all.

There are data-recovery outfits that you could try, but they are very VERY expensive. Could run into the thousands of dollars.

There's a lesson to be learned here.
It's called "the importance of backing up your data".
You are in the process of learning it right now, like it or not.

There probably isn't much you can do this time.
But, next time... back the Mac up!

 

[martin900]

Hi Fishrrman,
thanks for your answer.

So the loss of the logic board is lethal because it contains software, right? But still some companies claim that they can recover data from Fusion Drives with the use of only both healthy drives, SSD and HHD, how is that? It breaks my heart, because these companies are too few and too expensive, as you say. Here's what one of them states

"Once we have both the SSD and HDD in our data recovery lab, our senior logical data recovery engineers can puzzle out how the two components fit together. This is a tough job, since Apple’s technique for combining the drives is wholly proprietary (and they’re not interested in sharing their secrets). But our engineers can usually glue the two drives together with a high degree of success." Gillware

Secret stuff, so secret, so eccentric, so Apple.


Not that I was asking for it, but thanks for the lesson
"the importance of backing up your data"
you can be sure I got it already. And if I didn't, I can tell you I'll be getting all of it during the next weeks. I could say a couple of things on my behalf, but who cares.

Best regards