Thread: data recovery for Mac-formatted drive?

i recently had my Mac hard drive fail(120 GB 2.5" drive from a 3 year old Macbook Pro, and i am 100 percent certain it's hardware). in a Darwin-award-worthy act of stupidity, i accidentally erased my complete bootable backup last month. so basically all is lost.

has anyone tried a data recovery service on a Mac drive? any luck? how much did it cost? any recommendations? i need a hard-core data recovery service in Bangkok, the kind where they take the drive apart in a clean room.

if no one on here has any recommendations i'll probably call one of the places that Google introduced me to.

I downloaded a recovery program for my mac when I accidentally wiped one of my hard drives. I'll look through my apps to see if it was this mac or my old one.

It was called (something) Shield and the logo was a Knight's helmet behind a shield.

It got all my shit back though.

Sorry dude, it was my old mac. There's a thread about it somewhere here. I might have started it.

Found it.

DiskWarrior 4 - The Disk Utility for Mac Disk Repair, Mac Directory Repair, Mac Disk Recovery, Mac Data Recovery

There's probably a newer version available now as this was back in 2009 that I used it.

thanks but this is not something Disk Warrior, brilliant as it is, can fix. recovery programs like Stellar Phoenix won't work either, it's a hardware problem. most likely a crashed head/problem with the bearings. needs a surgeon and a clean room.

for anyone else who's having problems with their Mac disk, get Disk Warrior and run it once a month. used preemptively, it will save you from having to deal with the kind of disk catalog errors that can cause you to lose data.

if you hear a slow-ish clicking or wheezing from a hard drive instead of the standard hard drive noise, then you know it's a hardware problem. you can also tell when you put a drive in an external enclosure, because if the drive's spinning you'll feel it.

Originally Posted by StrontiumDog

You can get DW to run on the drive (the drive wouldn't mount using Apple's Disk utility, but if you let DW work its magic it will eventually work) and copy over some/all of the files.

as i said before, i'm well aware of the magic that DW can do, but this is not something DW can fix. one of the prerequisites for rebuilding the catalog is that the drive has to actually spin. this one doesn't.

a completely unrelated question, but does your screen name come from a Sci Fi comic book? i vaguely remember one called that.

i've contacted a couple of data recovery places, getting estimates, and such. one place is quite expensive but know what they're doing. 5k just to see what they can do, so i'm not sure my data's even worth that.

i have most documents that matter backed up but i'd really like to recover my recent emails and bookmarks. not sure it's worth much more than 5k to me, but if i go ahead with it i'll post details.

^^, Ah okay, no spin, no juice indeed.

Yeah, you can get someone to fix the components that are buggered, but it will be expensive. Best of luck.

And yes, Strontium Dog was a character from a 2000 AD comic, that I read when I was a child. For some reason it stuck....

2000 AD that's the one. i remember that too

i contacted a couple of places. one place is a blue chip data recovery joint, talked to a foreigner who works there, they want 5,000 up front and 15k to 25k to recover the data. nothing on there that's worth that.

then there's a mid-range place that want nothing if they can't recover data but i haven't gotten a quote yet.

i'm probably going to go to a really dodgy place in the bowels of the top floor of Pantip once i confirm that they'll do the surgery for a price i like.

there's an outside chance i'll try it myself if i can find a Hitachi drive made that same week to cannibalize. never done it before but i have watched youtube videos...

for real forensic recovery, it's going to be 1,000 USD

important data should always be on an online backup,

cheap these days for 2GB deals

yeh i'm not going the real forensic route, nothing on there's that valuable. all the major stuff is elsewhere and ephemeral stuff like recent resumes i can find in sent mail. the thing i'll miss most is my bookmarks, which're hardly worth US$1,000. or $500.

Your MAC hard drive fails, can tell me that is it spinning or not? If the drive is spinning then you can get access back to your data and back up with the help of some data recovery software, i will suggest you to go for "Kernel for Macintosh" data recovery software which will help you to retrieve your data.

^ it wasn't spinning, the hard drive is physically dead. if i was willing to spend the money someone would have had to perform surgery and put the disc in another hard drive mechanism (just finding the parts to do that is somewhat complicated). did find a place that would do it for 15k, and you only had to pay if they succeeded. i do have some data that'd be worth 15k to me, but fortunately i havent' lost that (yet).

Diskwarrior on the mac is brilliant for catalog errors. i have a similar problem on a disc formatted for windows. it's a bare 2 terabyte WD drive, i use it in an external dock, and it crapped out rather suddenly. strangely, i can mount it on a mac but not on my (windows 7) pc... a simple repair utility ought to do the trick but i'm not familiar with the options for windows...