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  1. 18-06-2015  #1

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    Anyone here ever had to have pro data recovery from a hard drive failure?

    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 :(

  2. 18-06-2015  #2

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    Hahahahah FUCK this happened to me except the youtube part -_- FML I had so much exclusive shit.
    Dude buy an SSD it's faster and Harder to break.

  3. 18-06-2015  #3

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    Once on my previous Mac, a similar happened to me; my Mac was being extremely slow, so I decided to restart it. Except when it restarted, it would load halfway on the loading screen and then shut off. I don't know what caused it, the only weird thing going on before I shut down my Mac was that it was being slow. Nevertheless, my drive was unbootable and unrepairable through disk utility in the disk recovery. But luckily I had a bootcamp partition and was able to boot into windows, which allowed me to use a free-trial app that gave windows permission to repair my OS X partition (the unbootable partition) from the windows side. So I was able to recover everything for free.

    The same thing happened to my current Mac, but unfortunately I didn't have a bootcamp partition on it, so I had to purchase a DiskWarrior usb for $120. It sucked having to spend that much money to recover everything, but my current Mac is what I use for school, so it was completely worth it! I guess the upside is, if something like that ever happens again, I can have my Mac recovered within minutes since I now have the DiskWarrior on hand.

  4. 18-06-2015  #4

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    The pros all use Linux based recovery tools. Many of them are open source and free too. Unfortunately all I had at the time was my Macbook and USB to try and salvage the files from my sick drive. A friend who has done diy data recovery for years laughed when I told him about the Mac software I tried (Data Rescue,Diskdrill,Diskwarrior) He said they're all garbage compared to the Windows/Linux tools. Diskwarrior is only good for fixing a corrupt boot directory,filesystem.
    He said NEVER try to clone a sick hard drive via USB unless it's the only option.
    The best method is connect directly to a desktop PC and place a fan over the drive to keep it cool if possible.

    Anyway hopefully my failure is just a logical one and not hardware related. The fact that the drive did not make the usual beeps or clicking noises and was still spinning gives me hope. :)

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