The context
Camille, a freelance filmmaker in Liège, is editing a documentary with a looming deadline. One morning, coffee spills on her MacBook Pro M2. The natural but unfortunate reflex: she tries to power it on several times. The screen stays black. The project — 890 GB of ProRes footage not yet backed up to her external drive — is entirely on the internal SSD.
The problem: on the MacBook Pro M2, the SSD is soldered to the board and encrypted via the T2 security chip. No shop can "pull the drive" as on an older laptop. The data is physically bound to a now-inert board.
The intervention
Free 24h diagnosis: the board shows localized corrosion around the power circuit; the storage chip and processor, however, appear intact. The plan: repair the board at component level to bring it to a state where the memory becomes readable — without ever separating the processor-storage pair that T2 security makes inseparable.
Steps performed in the lab:
- Desoxidation of the board in an ultrasonic bath, to dissolve corrosion down into the micro-vias.
- Replacement under a microscope of oxidized power components (coils, capacitors).
- Controlled power-up, then reading the memory via DFU mode, Apple's low-level interface.
- Decryption performed with the login password Camille provided — T2 security is never bypassed, it's used legitimately.
The result
In five days, all 890 GB of footage was extracted, verified (each video file opened and checked) then returned on a new encrypted external SSD. Camille approved the VeriFiles list before billing: €480 excl. VAT, per the board-level MacBook fee.