He has written it all down, and the order of events is itself the diagnosis. A 2009 iMac first "started freezing for no obvious reason", then made "a noise, as I recall, like a loud fan", then showed a grey screen bearing "a static question mark" — and now "the progress bar would show about 25% and then the computer would switch itself off". An earlier technician found "the hard drive kept crashing" and "left the recovery machine (or whatever it’s called) running all weekend", retrieving most things bar "roughly 6000 emails that I had saved offline" and a business database. Read in order, that is a mechanical hard drive dying in stages, and the missing email is far more likely a matter of where the first recovery looked than of what actually survived.
| Media | 3.5-inch SATA hard drive from a 2009 iMac — progressive mechanical degradation; partial recovery already performed elsewhere |
| Reported situation | Intermittent freezing over several days · new mechanical noise · grey screen with flashing question mark at startup · boot progress reaching roughly a quarter before power-off · weekend-long recovery run by a prior technician · offline email archive and a named business database file still missing |
| Fault class | Degrading heads and media on an aging drive, with a specific-target recovery: the user Library folder holding local mailboxes, and one application data file |
| Equipment used | Drive removed and imaged on DeepSpar Disk Imager with per-head mapping and targeted-region-first strategy · PC-3000 UDMA for firmware access and head control · clean-air inspection under laminar flow before any donor decision · HFS+ catalog parsed in R-Studio from the image to locate the Mail folders and the database file by path · hash-verified extraction |
The flashing question mark is the firmware saying it can no longer find a bootable system. It is not a software prompt; it appears before the operating system is involved. On a machine that booted normally for years, it means the startup volume has stopped answering coherently.
The order of symptoms tells the mechanical story. Freezing first is the drive retrying difficult sectors. The new noise is the mechanism working harder. A boot that reaches a quarter and dies is the system attempting to repair its own volume on the way up and stalling in the damaged region — and every one of those attempts flies the heads back over the worst part of the disk.
A weekend on a recovery machine is not a neutral fact. Cloning a crashing drive end-to-end for days, without per-head imaging and without skipping strategy, extracts data at the price of accelerating the failure. Whatever condition the drive was in before that weekend, it is worse now — which changes the plan, not the possibility.
The missing emails have a mundane explanation. Mail stored "On My Mac" lives inside the hidden user Library folder, not in the visible documents a migration naturally sweeps up. A recovery that copied the home folder's visible contents would collect nearly everything and miss the mailboxes entirely. Absent from the copy is not absent from the disk.
A named target changes the imaging order. Because the priorities are one application file and one folder tree, the catalog is parsed first and the regions holding those paths are imaged before anything else. On a deteriorating drive you spend its remaining life on the data that matters most, not on empty space.
The obsolete application is a separate, solvable problem. Recovering the data file does not require the old program to run anywhere. The file is extracted and verified as bytes; making it useful in a modern version is the software author's task, and a clean copy is exactly what that task needs.
The drive was removed, inspected, and imaged on DeepSpar Disk Imager with per-head mapping, unstable heads throttled and the catalog region taken first. The HFS+ catalog was parsed in R-Studio from the image, the user Library's Mail hierarchy and the database file located by path, and those regions imaged to completion ahead of a general pass. PC-3000 UDMA stood behind the imaging for firmware access, with clean-air inspection under laminar flow governing any donor decision. Extraction was hash-verified.
Targeted-first imaging of the catalog, the local mailbox tree, and the database file, then a general pass for the remainder. Free assessment, one fixed written figure including VAT; where a drive has to be opened, 50% of parts and labour is payable upfront with the balance only on success — otherwise no recovery, no fee. The decode: the first recovery looked in the visible places and your email lives in a hidden one. The drive paid for that weekend — what remains of its life gets spent on the two things you actually named.
Stop attempting to boot it — each attempt replays the damage in the worst region of the disk. If a previous recovery came back mostly complete but missing your email, ask specifically whether the user Library folder was captured; "On My Mac" mailboxes live there, hidden from casual copying. And name your priority files to whoever works on the drive next, because on failing hardware the order of imaging is the difference between getting them and not.
Our case files are written up from genuine enquiries our lab has handled for customers across Sheffield and South Yorkshire, anonymised to protect client confidentiality. Each one describes the diagnostic and recovery approach our engineers apply to that fault, using the equipment listed.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.