Unbelievable story really, but I am happy to be able to share my experience with a failing hard drive in my MacBook Pro.
A few days back I was at a client with my work's MacBook Pro (Unibody), when suddenly this Mac became unresponsive and it was hurling the dreaded Spinning Beachballs of Death™ left, right and centre.
After giving it a few minutes (hoping the slowdown was due to network failure as I had Apple Remote Desktop active, and a sudden drop of DNS server can cause slowdowns), I had to resort to the good ol' force turn off.
I waited 30 seconds, and turned my beloved MacBook Pro back on again.... hmm... no dice. Go the "no entry" sign.
I reset PRAM and tried to boot into Single User Mode. After waiting for about 2 minutes I finally got some sort of prompt: Disk I/O failure.
I switched it back off, and headed for home. Luckily I was done with my work at my client, but I had a bad feeling in my stomach... I hadn't done a proper backup for weeks!
I always tell everybody to make backups, as hard drives will always fail. The only question is when. But, me... do I listen to my own advice..? No, idiot that I am.
Since Friday I have been trying to get my data off this disk. My first move was simple: boot MBP into FireWire Target Disk mode, hook it to my Mac Pro and see if the partition mounts: nope.
Run Disk Utility and try to Repair Disk: "Disk Utility is unable to repair this disk". It told me to make a backup and re-format. Nice.
Next steps, keeping it in FireWire Target Disk mode, hooked to the Mac Pro:
1) Use Data Rescue 3.0.1
Gr8! This little app has shown its capabilities on many a client's Macs. But, after letting it scan the volume for about half a day, it was getting clear that it wouldn't help me out....
2) DiskWarrior 4.1
Okay, so Data Rescue 3 couldn't "see" my files on this broken File System, so I gave DiskWarrior 4.1 a try to "replace" the damaged File System, and see if it will become readable again. No, sir. Again after a very long time (16 hours) it became apparent that I could wait forever before DiskWarrior got through the process.
At this time that bad little feeling I had in my stomach turned into a slight panic as it became more and more logical I probably would never see my latest data again... and yes there were quite a few documents I really, really wanted back..!
3) Drive Genius 2.3
Okay... my collection of software tools is now running out... I gave Drive Genius 2.3 a whirl. But same old story. Took half a day to find out nothing will happen.
By this time it was Sunday morning. And, TBO... I had almost given up.
Until... I had one idiotic idea....
This MacBook Pro had two operating systems on it... Mac OS X 10.6.2 and Windows 7 via Boot Camp 3.1.
My panicking brain told me that Boot Camp 3.x has one new feature: HFS+ read support in Windows. So, I booted this MacBook Pro into Windows 7, logged into my account and browsed "My Computer".
The partition named "Macintosh HD" appeared in the Window. Okay.... dare I try open the volume? Yes.. and it listed all the Mac stuff... and yes /Users/<myname>/ too!!!
Luckily I always have a couple of Mac OS X Servers around @ home where I could create a sharepoint to be shared via SMB. Got this Windows MacBook Pro connected via ethernet (Gb), and tried to copy my whole Mac-homedirectory.
That didn't work (predictably) as it got too many errors while trying to access the data on the Mac partition.
So, I resorted to manual copying of the files and folders I needed most, followed by whole directories I wanted, until i got to the inevitable errors.
But, to my surprise, I got most of my beloved data copied to the server!!! Not everything, but I think I got all that I really needed back, and most of what I wanted too!!
Who would have thought it.... no "usual" software tool could help me out, but the HFS+ read feature of Boot Camp 3.1 on Windows made it easy.
I have learned two lessons here:
1) Next time try Boot Camp earlier
2) Back the F*** Up like I tell everyone else to do!!
I hope someone reading this learns from my mistakes.
Cheers,
-MacsRgr8
A few days back I was at a client with my work's MacBook Pro (Unibody), when suddenly this Mac became unresponsive and it was hurling the dreaded Spinning Beachballs of Death™ left, right and centre.
After giving it a few minutes (hoping the slowdown was due to network failure as I had Apple Remote Desktop active, and a sudden drop of DNS server can cause slowdowns), I had to resort to the good ol' force turn off.
I waited 30 seconds, and turned my beloved MacBook Pro back on again.... hmm... no dice. Go the "no entry" sign.
I reset PRAM and tried to boot into Single User Mode. After waiting for about 2 minutes I finally got some sort of prompt: Disk I/O failure.
I switched it back off, and headed for home. Luckily I was done with my work at my client, but I had a bad feeling in my stomach... I hadn't done a proper backup for weeks!
I always tell everybody to make backups, as hard drives will always fail. The only question is when. But, me... do I listen to my own advice..? No, idiot that I am.
Since Friday I have been trying to get my data off this disk. My first move was simple: boot MBP into FireWire Target Disk mode, hook it to my Mac Pro and see if the partition mounts: nope.
Run Disk Utility and try to Repair Disk: "Disk Utility is unable to repair this disk". It told me to make a backup and re-format. Nice.
Next steps, keeping it in FireWire Target Disk mode, hooked to the Mac Pro:
1) Use Data Rescue 3.0.1
Gr8! This little app has shown its capabilities on many a client's Macs. But, after letting it scan the volume for about half a day, it was getting clear that it wouldn't help me out....
2) DiskWarrior 4.1
Okay, so Data Rescue 3 couldn't "see" my files on this broken File System, so I gave DiskWarrior 4.1 a try to "replace" the damaged File System, and see if it will become readable again. No, sir. Again after a very long time (16 hours) it became apparent that I could wait forever before DiskWarrior got through the process.
At this time that bad little feeling I had in my stomach turned into a slight panic as it became more and more logical I probably would never see my latest data again... and yes there were quite a few documents I really, really wanted back..!
3) Drive Genius 2.3
Okay... my collection of software tools is now running out... I gave Drive Genius 2.3 a whirl. But same old story. Took half a day to find out nothing will happen.
By this time it was Sunday morning. And, TBO... I had almost given up.
Until... I had one idiotic idea....
This MacBook Pro had two operating systems on it... Mac OS X 10.6.2 and Windows 7 via Boot Camp 3.1.
My panicking brain told me that Boot Camp 3.x has one new feature: HFS+ read support in Windows. So, I booted this MacBook Pro into Windows 7, logged into my account and browsed "My Computer".
The partition named "Macintosh HD" appeared in the Window. Okay.... dare I try open the volume? Yes.. and it listed all the Mac stuff... and yes /Users/<myname>/ too!!!
Luckily I always have a couple of Mac OS X Servers around @ home where I could create a sharepoint to be shared via SMB. Got this Windows MacBook Pro connected via ethernet (Gb), and tried to copy my whole Mac-homedirectory.
That didn't work (predictably) as it got too many errors while trying to access the data on the Mac partition.
So, I resorted to manual copying of the files and folders I needed most, followed by whole directories I wanted, until i got to the inevitable errors.
But, to my surprise, I got most of my beloved data copied to the server!!! Not everything, but I think I got all that I really needed back, and most of what I wanted too!!
Who would have thought it.... no "usual" software tool could help me out, but the HFS+ read feature of Boot Camp 3.1 on Windows made it easy.
I have learned two lessons here:
1) Next time try Boot Camp earlier
2) Back the F*** Up like I tell everyone else to do!!
I hope someone reading this learns from my mistakes.
Cheers,
-MacsRgr8