MacforScience wrote:
"This has got to be the dumbest advice ever. Please don't do this. This advice should be removed from MacRumors just to make sure nobody else follows it. You clearly want the data—fine. Go to a professional and have it done right. The fact that this advice passes the sniff test says you need more help than a forum can provide."
YOUR post above, sir, is nonsense.
I can personally attest to having recovered a seemingly "unrecoverable" drive by doing EXACTLY what I outlined above.
In some cases, consumer-level data recovery software can't "get to" a volume if the drivers are munged, regardless of the condition of the drive's directory or the data on the platters.
I faced this situation where I had a corrupted partition that DataRescue couldn't "see".
So I re-initialized the ENTIRE DRIVE to a single partition (HFS+ with journaling enabled). The other partitions on the drive weren't important, but the unreadable one was.
I could then mount the drive in the finder, and DataRescue could see it as well.
Of course the drive appeared to be empty, because the directory was brand-new and untouched.
But also "untouched" was the OLD DATA on the drive. It was out there on the platters, but how to see it and make sense of it?
I then had DR do a full scan of the drive. Since the files I wanted to recover were mp3 files, I set up DR to look for mainly those file types.
DR was able to RECOVER the data from the re-initialized drive to my "scratch drive".
I did lose many of the file names, and of course the folder hierarchy was lost because folder hierarchies are a construct of a drive's directory -- and that was wiped out by the re-initialization. But the DATA on the drive's sectors was left INTACT, because I chose not to do a "secure erase" which would over-write each sector with random 1's and 0's.
My solution to re-organizing the thousands of mp3 files I discovered quite serendipitously -- I created a new iTunes library, and then "dumped" the entire mass of recovered files into it.
Even though file names (names from the finder) were lost, most of the METADATA inside the files came through intact. And iTunes was able to read the metadata, and re-organize the loose files into artists and albums!
So again -- I RECOVERED the files by RE-INITIALIZING the drive.
Whether you believe it or not.
It's worth noting that the "iTunes trick" is what saved me -- otherwise I might have been left with thousands of files, identified only by numbers.
I'm thinking that this might also work with photos, as well -- with either iPhoto or Photos being able to read the metadata and re-organize lost files (but I've never tried this).
For files that don't have any metadata, one will probably have to deal with file recovery "numbers" rather than names. And that will entail quite a bit of work in getting things back in order.
I only suggest this as a last resort. In my case, I had a lot of "lost data", but it wasn't comprised of stuff I would "pay to recover". So I used the tools I had on-hand. And it worked.
So go on and "sniff" anywhere you wish, "MacForScience".
I would not advise anyone to try the "re-initialize and recover" trick if I hadn't found it to work myself.