After searching around, it seems that there's a moderately common problem with Yosemite where if you boot into Windows, and then back into Mac, it damages your partitions. Usually it seems that this just hits the Windows partition, but for me it destroyed both the Mac and Windows partitions.
I booted up to a recovery drive, imaged the entire 'damaged' harddrive, and then set out trying to repair it.
I was able to recover everything in my user folder, but I can't recover anything in /Library or /Applications. Both folders appear empty (though the harddrive space is still 83 GB free, so they have not been openly deleted) and -- more oddly -- when I first open the root directory, /Library and /Applications appear as white file icons, before switching to plain folder icons after a couple seconds.
There are a couple programs I would like to recover that were sent to me privately for work and the programmers of which I no longer have contacted. Unfortunately my backups only backed up my User folder, which I could recover anyway, making them not ultra helpful.
I've tried Disk Drill and a couple other file recovery programs, but it seems like they only find "standard" file types (.txt, .avi, ... whatever). Since I'm trying to recover .apps, it does not seem like it finds them at all.
Any ideas here for good recovery programs? Is there any program that recovers the directory structure as well? I know the files aren't simply "hidden" because if I look inside /Library and /Applications with ls -al nothing. Not even . or .. ! So somehow these two folders were badly corrupted.
I booted up to a recovery drive, imaged the entire 'damaged' harddrive, and then set out trying to repair it.
I was able to recover everything in my user folder, but I can't recover anything in /Library or /Applications. Both folders appear empty (though the harddrive space is still 83 GB free, so they have not been openly deleted) and -- more oddly -- when I first open the root directory, /Library and /Applications appear as white file icons, before switching to plain folder icons after a couple seconds.
There are a couple programs I would like to recover that were sent to me privately for work and the programmers of which I no longer have contacted. Unfortunately my backups only backed up my User folder, which I could recover anyway, making them not ultra helpful.
I've tried Disk Drill and a couple other file recovery programs, but it seems like they only find "standard" file types (.txt, .avi, ... whatever). Since I'm trying to recover .apps, it does not seem like it finds them at all.
Any ideas here for good recovery programs? Is there any program that recovers the directory structure as well? I know the files aren't simply "hidden" because if I look inside /Library and /Applications with ls -al nothing. Not even . or .. ! So somehow these two folders were badly corrupted.