Can I Save My BlackBook's Hard Drive?

[Spencer818]

My brother's hard drive recently crashed in his MacBook. Without any warning, it just started up one day with the flashing question mark on the folder symbol, and the hard drive was clicking like mad. He took it to the Apple Store, and they replaced the hard drive for him, and gave him his old one back if he wanted to try and recover it. I purchased DiskWarrior and have it installed on my iMac and his MacBook. I was just wondering what approach I should take to trying to recover the data off of his old hard drive. I know I will need it in an external enclosure and I have one on the way but I want a plan once it gets here.

Thanks in advance!

 

[SFStateStudent]

I've heard about people putting it in a ziplock and freezing it, then try mounting it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It actually costs quite a bit to retrieve data from a old and battered hard drive, somewhere in the area of $2,000 - $3,000. Not sure how successful they are, but even less success with Apple Store Genius, that's why they "give" you the old damaged hard drive.

 

[asme]

A TARDIS and an external drive off Craigslist.

 

[Spencer818]

So once I get my external enclosure, if I am able to get the drive working again with DiskWarrior, what will DiskWarrior do with it? Will if just repair the drive and then I can use migration assitant or will it make a dmg of the hard drive onto my new hard drive?

 

[bankshot]

I had this failure twice on my Macbook (before switching to a different brand drive and keeping the latest warranty-replaced drive as an external backup). I tried everything, including the freezer trick, DiskWarrior, and Data Rescue II. Nothing worked. Those drives were dead. Anything's worth a shot, but I'd say don't get your hopes up.

It's nice that they gave you the old drive back - in my case, they always wanted it because they said they had to send it back to Apple or Seagate (I forget which). I did convince one "genius" to let it spin up and physically mash the head into the platters so data would be destroyed.

If DiskWarrior were successful, you'd have a working drive/volume on your desktop. At that point, you could use any tool, including just the Finder, to copy data off of it. Like I said, I highly doubt this will happen, though. Most likely, DW (and the OS in general) won't see a drive to repair at all.

Finally, if by some miracle you do get DW to see the drive but it fails to repair due to hardware errors, I highly recommend Data Rescue II. I had a recent case of a failed drive (Western Digital MyBook) where DiskWarrior simply couldn't complete its rebuild of the directory because it kept running into hardware errors. DW is fantastic for corrupted filesystems, but only if the drive is still physically working. Data Rescue II takes a completely different approach - instead of trying to rebuild the directory to get a fully working volume, it simply tries to recover as many individual files as it possibly can. I was able to use that to recover 95% of the files from the MyBook before it went totally bad.

Good luck!

 

[Spencer818]

Thanks a lot for the detailed responce. Much appreciated