MAC- recover data from dead hard drive.

[Warrior61]

Ok heres the deal, and if you can help i would be very appreciative. My HD crashed, I bought a new one and changed it out myself on my Macbook (OS Tiger). The start up disk is downloading now. I also bought a HD Encloser, Rocket fish to see if my dead HD could act like an external HD and i could get some 4 years of media and SCHOOL WORK off of it. I put my dead HD in the Enclosure and it won't read on mac or pc. I've tried 2 enclosures on the off chance one was just bad and it would be a sure tell if my HD was really fried or not. I'm 99.765% sure that it is.

Can some one give me any suggestions or instructions on what to do? I would be very thankful.

 

[Stryder]

Give this program a go TestDisk.

I used it a couple of weeks back to repair an external thumb drive which had lost it's partition, it fixed it easily. If you are careful with it and don't tell it or the OS to format your drive you should be able to data recover unless the drive itself has a physical fault.

 

[Warrior61]

well the enclosure is not showing up in the USB drive. I have already removed the dead HD so before i can test it i have to connect it. Does that make sense?

 

[Stryder]

Yes, what you mean is you took the erroring drive out of your MAC and it's not working in your enclosure. I'd suggest putting it back in your MAC and running the testdisk program through a livedisc method, if of course it detects your drive is there.

Otherwise you might have to pay a premium to get someone to recover it for you, however I'm pretty sure as a student you won't want to be paying that premium.

 

[river-wind]

It's possible that the disk is not mounting properly, so it doesn't show up on the desktop when you first plug the USB enclosure into the machine.

To be thorough, lest check everything else first.
1) Does the enclosure have a power light, and is it lit?
2) When you plug the drive in, do you hear the drive spinning up?
3) Does that USB port work if you plug an external keyboard into it?


If those three are yes, then we can move on:
5) Plug in the drive, and open disk utility in ~/Applications/Utilities. Is the drive listed in there?
6) Open System Profiler from the Apple menu. Is the drive listed there?
7) if not, see if you have USB Prober in /Developer/Applications/Utilities/ If so, try running it to see if it triggers the USB stack to pick up the drive.

8) If you can get the disk mounted, run repair permissions in Disk Utility. It's possible that a corrupt bit has caused the drive to become No Access - if so you may need to enable the root user and do this is as root (rare problem, but it happens)
9) Then run Disk Warrior against it. By far the best tool available for fixing busted up mac system installs.


alternately, if you can't get the drive to mount, and you have a second mac available somewhere, you could put the HD back into the laptop, and boot the machine into Target disk Mode (hold down 't' during boot). this will make the machine act like an external drive, and the HD may show up on the second machine if you plug them together.

Finally, you have a number of command line options to help here. Only attempt these items if you are comfortable with the command line, or ar at your wit's end, and have no other option. These utilities will assume you know what you are doing, and you can make things worse if you do it wrong.

Try hdutil mountvol against the drive, and if you can mount it, try fsck.

Since this is a macbook, you also have an EFI bootloader available. read this thread to see some EFI-options for force-mounting the drive:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060718140450785

see also, using the linux/GNU tool ddrescue: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050720092514388

 

[sannyfairy]

To recover lost or missing data from inaccessible mac hard drive, it would be beneficial to go for mac drive recovery which can be considered as a helpful solution for complete and safe recovery.