data recovery/hard drive repair? HELP!

[sinisterdesign]

my neighbor & i each had hard drives crash on us w/in a week trying to be proactive running maintenance software. hers crashed while running TechTools Pro, mine locked up during Norton Speed Disk. both have TRASHED the hard drives. i'm not an EXPERT Mac tech, but i can hold my own. nothing that i've tried has helped. can any of you offer some advice?

here's what we've tried:

- Norton Utilities: nothing. "unexpected error" kind of thing. is it just my imagination, or is Norton a POS?
- Disk Utility: nothing. i can verify & repair mine (hers isn't even seen), but it does nothing.
- Tech Tools: CD was trashed after it ate her hard drive, so i wasn't able to try it out on mine.
- Disk Warrior: "encountered unexpected error", like errors are EVER expected...
- ProSoft's Data Recovery: it ACTS like it's recovering a ton of data, but the files won't open. i was able to recover files, file structure, icons, etc. but only about 2% of the files actually opened (none of hers opened).
- OSX reinstall: won't even see the hard drive.

i've lost some really important docs (movies, emails, etc), but i have all my extremely important stuff (photos, music, projects) backed up. she, on the other hand, has lost most of her digital life.

one of you would be her hero if you can help us figure it out... THX

 

[aricher]

Are these extrenal or interal drives? I ask because I had an external drive die on me and was able to get it running by removing it from the case and installing internally.

 

[telecomm]

Have you tried connecting via firewire to another mac in "target disk mode"? That worked for me when I had some crazy problems (you don't know the meaning of "bad RAM" until you try to install an operating system on a computer with bad RAM).

Just shut down the troubled computer, connect to a working computer that's booted up, and start up the sick computer while holding down the "T" key. Best of luck.

 

[sinisterdesign]

Are these extrenal or interal drives? I ask because I had an external drive die on me and was able to get it running by removing it from the case and installing internally.

hmm, hers is external, mine is internal. may be worth a try. not like i could screw it up any worse than it is. thx

 

[sinisterdesign]

Have you tried connecting via firewire to another mac in "target disk mode"? That worked for me when I had some crazy problems (you don't know the meaning of "bad RAM" until you try to install an operating system on a computer with bad RAM).

Just shut down the troubled computer, connect to a working computer that's booted up, and start up the sick computer while holding down the "T" key. Best of luck.

cool, i'll give that a try this evening. i've read about target disk mode numerous times, but never tried it. guess never needed to.

 

[Dogfood1]

Have you checked your RAM?

I don't know if your problems manifested themselves after updating to 10.3.6, but I had problems like these after updating. Luckily, I have an external FW drive and saved all my files - but the hard drive symptoms are very similar.

The description of all the utilities not working was exactly the problem I had. I removed my user-installed RAM (512MB chip in my FP iMac) all the problems went away. Diskwarrior and Drive10 were able to fix the problems they wouldn't fix before and my clean installation of 10.3 went smoothly.

No real advise on saving data, but the RAM thing was a significant epiphany.

Good Luck,

Dogfood1

 

[SallyWattle]

Norton Speed Disk

Some time ago I was using speed disk and the computer crashed. Every other utility I tried would not help.

Several days later I tried speed disk again, maybe several times. Then it finished and every thing was working.

All I can put it down to is that speed disk must do something wierd that other utilities don't know or recognise and only it can restore the hard drive to a working condition.

Don't install nortons utilities always use it from the cd.

 

[sinisterdesign]

Some time ago I was using speed disk and the computer crashed. Every other utility I tried would not help.

Several days later I tried speed disk again, maybe several times. Then it finished and every thing was working.

All I can put it down to is that speed disk must do something wierd that other utilities don't know or recognise and only it can restore the hard drive to a working condition.
Don't install nortons utilities always use it from the cd.

intriguing. if norton can still see the drive (don't think it can), i'll give that a shot....thx