A university researcher’s MacBook Pro stopped at the screen every Mac owner dreads: the flashing folder with a question mark — no startup disk found. Inside sat years of academic research, lecture materials and personal documents; behind it, no backup; ahead of it, a conference the work was due at. The machine came to Princes Street on the emergency track.
Diagnostics found the double fault that folder usually hides: the SSD had developed bad sectors, and the APFS file system on it had corrupted past the point of mounting — each problem feeding the other. The SSD came out of the MacBook and onto imaging hardware built for exactly this: a sector-by-sector clone that works around unreadable regions rather than hammering them, capturing everything the failing drive could still give. The APFS repair then ran entirely on the image — container and volume structures reconstructed, the directory tree and metadata rebuilt, fragmented files pieced whole — with extraction ordered by the researcher’s own priorities: research first, lectures second, everything else after.
99% of the data was verified and returned within 48 hours on a new external SSD — conference met, years of work intact, and one convert to Time Machine created on the spot. The pattern generalises: a question-mark folder is nearly always a recoverable drive being asked to boot rather than to surrender its data — and every hopeful restart spends a little more of what the imaging needs.
Flashing question mark on your own Mac? Stop the restart cycle and read the Mac recovery page — especially the part about finding your FileVault key while the bench works. The first step never changes: a free diagnostic and a fixed written quote before anything is at stake — or call 0131 202 0491 and describe what happened.