can hard drive data be recovered with external USB case?

[enginerd]

Hi everybody,

I have a an old OS 9 G3 that no longer boots--gets the ? on startup. I tried Techtool and it can detect the drive and find problems but it is unable to make it startable (rebuild button is grayed! ). Can I pull out the drive, put it in an external usb enclosure, connect it to a modern OS X machine and read data from it? This works in the PC world but I never tried it on a mac.
Anybody have any tips on how I can recover some data??

Thanks!

 

[RiseAgainst]

Taking into consideration that the HDD problem will not stop the Finder from mounting it, yes this can be done.

 

[enginerd]

Finder does detect it when I boot from CD, but it says the volume is unrecognized and asks if I want to reinitialize it. (I clicked cancel so I could try techtool analysis). Would I get this same message when it is connected to another mac via usb??

 

[jackieonasses]

honestly it sounds like it is at the point of no return. you can try but it is doubtful. (from what i make out from it)

 

[RiseAgainst]

Well theres really know way to tell unless you try it. But if you booted from a cd and it still can't read it there might be a problem reading the entire disk (maybee theres a problem with the File System?) and that might need a format.

For whats its worth, its really shouldnt take long to set the drive in the USB enclusure, i mean, what have you to loose. If it works or not will depend on how bad the drive is messed up.

 

[enginerd]

Just gave it a try..I was able to mount the disk and list the folders, but opening any folder would cause finder to hang. ah well, least most of the stuff was backed up and I now have a nice paperweight.

 

[Sun Baked]

Just gave it a try..I was able to mount the disk and list the folders, but opening any folder would cause finder to hang. ah well, least most of the stuff was backed up and I now have a nice paperweight.

If you got that far, Disk First Aid should have at least run on the thing -- though there is a good chance that something more would have been needed.

It's those times when the drive repair utilities and disk utility decide that the disk in fragged that the trouble begins.

Anyway DFA probably wouldn't have worked, since the disk catalog/file system was probably too badly damaged -- ie, opening anything crashes the Finder.