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Hi
I recently had the logic board on my MacBook Pro (Nov 2019 launch) 512Gb model suddenly fail without any physical or liquid damage and 6 months after the 1 year limited warranty
For others who have experienced this, were you able to recover the data when you had similar failures? Any pointers from real experiences appreciated instead of generic support article links
Hi abhijit49,
Thank you for the detailed post. Unfortunately, in your situation, data recovery is 99% impossible.
Your Mac contains the Apple T2 Security Chip, which provides hardware encryption for all of your data. This encryption ensures that if an attacker or thief were to circumvent the protections provided by your Mac, the data inside would be rendered inaccessible. It also ensures that if you choose to erase your Mac, an attacker can't recover the data afterwards.
The T2 chip stores several important keys that are required to unlock your data. Unfortunately, if the main logic board is fried, the T2 Security Chip is already soldered to that board, and is most likely fried as well. If the T2 Security Chip is fried, that makes the required keys it holds inaccessible, rendering your data forever inaccessible.
In addition to all of this, your internal drive is also soldered to the main logic board, and is probably fried as well.
A successful recovery would require the following, which would be basically impossible:
If you get your Mac repaired or choose to purchase a new Mac, please be sure to make regular backups.
EDIT: If there is some way to perform an in-place repair on the faulted logic board itself, that would allow you to skip conditions 3-5. I highly doubt that such is even possible though. Your best bet would probably be Louis Rossman.
Currently your two options are to either have Drive Savers attempt to recovery the data for you. Our organization has used Driver Savers several times many years ago. We were satisfied with Drive Savers (sometimes they could not recover data and we were not charged). We have not had any recent experience with Drive Savers since our organizations implements much a much better backup policy these days. Drive Saves is one of the best and most respected data recovery specialists around and I've even heard other professional data recovery services will even send stuff to them at times.
The second option is to find someone who repairs Apple Logic Boards and hope they are able to get the Logic Board functional enough to allow the T2 chip, SSD, and USB-C ports to operate. This won't be cheap either and some people who claim they can repair Apple Logic Boards really don't know what they are doing as I've seen one well respected repair center in NYC (basically the only one with nearly 5 star reviews) show YouTube videos repairing other repair shops' mistakes since those other shops don't know how to read schematics. Plus there are some parts on a Mac Logic Board that cannot be purchased so if any of these components are damaged, then no repair will be possible (blame Apple for blocking the sale of these parts to independent repair shops).
If you have data that was not backed up, then I suggest in the future that you have the backups performed more frequently. You may also want to save another copy of any critical files to external media as well so you have more than a single copy of the file(s). Keep in mind this can be dangerous as well since if you overwrite the copy on the external media you may end up corrupting the old version if the new version is not properly saved. Yes, I'm paranoid about my very important critical files.
To the question:
Just how old is this MBP?
This is a Jan-2020 purchase (and Apple launched this currently (as on date) sold 16” model in Nov-2019)
My "real" experience is that data is not lost if you maintain a backup.
This same thing has just happened to me, same 2019 16 inch model. I was given drive savers card and am actually mailing my computer there today. Did you end up having luck with them?
MacBook Pro 2019 16” logic board failure. Is data recovery possible for this?
