Question Mark Folder/Data Rescue II

You just tried and failed using the two best methods of trying to recover data from a sick drive. If Data Recovery II can't "see" the drive, it's probably beyond recovery or repair.

How valuable is your friend's data? There are places (data recovery specialists) where you can send the drive and they'll recover most or all of the data if possible. But it's expensive, very expensive.

Example here:

http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/

Regards.

Does DiskUtility allow you to do a Repair Disk?
Does it report a SMART status of the drive?

question mark

I have the blinking question mark folder and can't boot on the MacBook laptop.

I reset the PRAM and started holding option and only saw a pix of a hard drive and an arrow below it point up.

Any suggestions? It is only 1 year old and worked excellent up until the question mark folder today.

You've probably got a bad drive all together. better to just replace it.

To danieldad
Do you have applecare?

Not sure if you have come up with anything yet, but I just used DataRescue2 last night. My hard drive crashed on my Powerbook G4 and I got the folder with the flashing ?mark. If you purchase the software they will mail you a bootable CD, just restart the computer with the CD in and hold down the C key and it will run the program without mounting your hard drive.

Okay, Let's sayI'm having a craptastic day , and my mother's school laptop decides to crash, and when I restarted it, all I got was the aforementioned blinking question folder. and It's a school laptop. is there any way to unscrew it?

Question Mark almost always means new hard drive.
BTW OP, there is a device sold at FRY's electronics, that has sata & ide plugs on one end & an usb plug at the other, has a power source plug also & will mount the drive to the desktop unless the bearing is gone. it was 20-30 dollars & has worked for me 3 or 4 times.
Good luck.

mperkins37 said:

Question Mark almost always means new hard drive.
BTW OP, there is a device sold at FRY's electronics, that has sata & ide plugs on one end & an usb plug at the other, has a power source plug also & will mount the drive to the desktop unless the bearing is gone. it was 20-30 dollars & has worked for me 3 or 4 times.
Good luck.

Click to expand...

Realistically, that type of external adapter is doing just what the OP was doing by trying to mount it via Target Disk Mode- and if the other computer can't "see" the drive in TDM, it will not see it from the external adapter or an external enclosure. I have a couple of those and several type of external enclosures on my bench and they are helpful at times but...

A question mark on the startup drive can also just indicate directory corruption as it often does, so Disk Warrior can handle that- but again, if it is not seen at all in TDM or via an external adapter then indeed it is most likely a hardware problem and DW won't be able to see it either unfortunately!

BTW- To the person above who mentioned data recovery services- yes $$$$$! A business I do work for recently had a 320Gb drive done by them and they quoted initially a range of $500 to $2200 pending diagnosis. It wound up costing them about $1400, but they recovered almost everything on a critical drive that they had somehow managed to skip backing up. Naturally the only machine in the building that wasn't backed up!