The unthinkable happened the other day my main hard drive crashed on my Mac. I was watching a Youtube video and up popped the spinning colored ball which froze my laptop. I had to hard restart and the dreaded white screen folder with the question mark appeared. I know what that means and it is not good.
It was only a year old 750g WD Scorpio Black 7200. I've always been good about backing up my drives, my last crash was in 2009, but I was able to save all my data with Diskwarrior. Ironically my external drives which contain my project files and most source files etc were just backed up a few weeks ago. I simply neglected to run Time Machine on my main drive in my laptop for 5 months.

Anyway took out the drive and connected it to USB. Checked disk utility and it said disk needs to be repaired )Invalid Node Structure) the disk is seen by the system just wouldn't mount. I could feel it spinning.

I used a trial version of a Mac app called Data Rescue to try and scan the drive to retrieve my files and it got to about 20% with 4 hrs to go, and all of a sudden said "slow reads" 23678 hours to complete. I'm guessing that's what happens when it hits an unreadable part of the disk.

Next I used an app called Diskdrill to save a copy of the damaged HD image DMG to my empty 2tb external. It took about 8 hrs but it completed.

I then ran Diskwarrior on the copy DMG and it said it rebuilt the directory, but maybe I messed it up because I still could not mount the image on my desktop.

Anyway after that I decided not to risk any more possible damage to the drive running it and take it to a pro with Linux based professional recovery tools, not the inferior Mac ones I tried to use via USB.
I'm hoping they can recover the data and it was just a logical failure (bad blocks,corrupt filesystem etc) the drive spun up and never made the clicking noise of previous hardware failures so I'm hopeful.

Either way these big data recovery places like Ontrack,Drivesavers,Gillware totally take advantage of desperate people in my opinion. One place quoted me $50 per gigabyte! Lol Another said between $200 and $300 only if 90%+ can be recovered. Fortunately I have a friend who runs a computer repair business with data recovery services, but if it needs to be taken apart it will be going to Drivesavers which is going to be expensive.

Has anyone here ever had to go the pro recovery route, and was it a success? I seem to have horrible luck with Western Digital, next would be Seagate. I guess when you have 10 yr old sweatshop kids and old women mass assembling these things in Malaysia, quality assurance is probably hit and miss.

The moral of the story. Don't procrastinate like me.. BACK UP YOUR DRIVES AND BACK THEM UP OFTEN! or you may end up in the same boat as me right now :(