Yet another hard drive failure question

chirpie · Feb 4, 2015

Got an old 320gb My Book external drive.

Suddenly showed up with the error "This disk is unreadable, do you want to initialize?"

Tore it out, have the bare drive inside, installed that into a 2008 Mac Pro tower.

Still the same message.

Ran over to disk utility to see what it saw, got the following:

Can't do anything for typical repairs there.

Tried Tech Tool Pro 7. Got the following:

I tried clicking "run surface scan" and the test looks like it's about to start for a fraction of a second but then stops and acts like nothing happened.

So what's the good word? Am I SOL? ^_^;

matthewtoney · Feb 4, 2015

chirpie said:
Got an old 320gb My Book external drive.

Suddenly showed up with the error "This disk is unreadable, do you want to initialize?"

Tore it out, have the bare drive inside, installed that into a 2008 Mac Pro tower.

Still the same message.

Ran over to disk utility to see what it saw, got the following:

Image

Can't do anything for typical repairs there.

Tried Tech Tool Pro 7. Got the following:

Image

I tried clicking "run surface scan" and the test looks like it's about to start for a fraction of a second but then stops and acts like nothing happened.

So what's the good word? Am I SOL? ^_^;

I would assume it is toast.

I also assume your only concern is saving data off it - a 320GB drive isn't exactly worth a lot for actual use.

You don't mention if the drive is making any obvious noises that are unusual - particularly things like it constantly spinning up. I've been in that situation with one that just tried over and over to spin up (unsuccessfully) and was actually able to recover my data using a seriously kludgy method - wrapping the drive and sticking it in the freezer and then attaching it to an external enclosure and copying off as much as I could until it warmed up enough that it stopped working again.

That's a rather brute force method but it works sometimes - I was able to save off nearly 500GB of videos files doing that over and over and then I just trashed the drive once I was done.

I've also used Spinrite successfully to repair/recover data from a drive, although I've never tried it on a Mac volume.

chirpie · Feb 4, 2015

matthewtoney said:
I would assume it is toast. I also assume your only concern is saving data off it - a 320GB drive isn't exactly worth a lot for actual use.

You don't mention if the drive is making any obvious noises that are unusual - particularly things like it constantly spinning up. I've been in that situation with one that just tried over and over to spin up (unsuccessfully) and was actually able to recover my data using a seriously kludgy method - wrapping the drive and sticking it in the freezer and then attaching it to an external enclosure and copying off as much as I could until it warmed up enough that it stopped working again. That's a rather brute force method but it works sometimes - I was able to save off nearly 500GB of videos files doing that over and over and then I just trashed the drive once I was done.

I've also used Spinrite successfully to repair/recover data from a drive, although I've never tried it on a Mac volume.

I've done that freezer trick before. Man it's been years! loll

I suppose I'll save that as a hail mary option. ^_^

I haven't been able to detect any audible weirdness (Like the wonderful clicking noise of the arm of the drive banging against the hard drive case. ^_^)

And you're intuition is correct. Only the data is my concern.

Thanks for the reply.

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Yet another hard drive failure question

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