Data recovery

You could try something like DiskWarrior. It's pretty good at recovering data from a busted drive.

 

It sounds like there may be a physical disk problem. Bare in mind that any attempts to recover data may result in further damage. If the data is truly critical, I would recommend contacting a data recovery firm in order to maximize your chances for a full recover.
That said, this can be expensive. It can easily run over $1000. If that is not an option, there are several things that you can try first. SpinRite does a very aggressive job of recovering/repairing bad sectors, and is a good place to start your recovery attempt (FYI - this is BIOS only, so It will not run from your Mac). Next I would go to an app like Disk Warrior which will help recover allocation tables for files and partitions.
Good Luck.

 

I've had good results with Data Rescue and with FileSalvage, on separate occasions.

These products (and the oft-mentioned Drive Warrior) use different approaches to data recovery, so if one doesn't recover your data, don't hesitate to try another. And most offer a free trial to see if anything will be recovered, so you can see if it'll work in your particular situation that before you purchase a product.

.tsooJ

 

I've got the same problem! I can't get to my precious files. Just recently my iMac became very very slow, and then stopped working at all. So I removed the hard drive from inside the mac, and I used a dock very similar to yours to try an access it, but even though the hard drive powers up, the mac i have it plugged in to won't respond. Nothing comes up in finder. How can I recover the files on this drive?? I just need to recover all iPhoto photos

 

Do you not have a time machine backup of this data, if the data is important to you it should always be regularly backed up. I have 3 backups copies of my music / photos and other data in addition to a full time machine backup. HDD's are mechanical, and its not a case of if they fail, they will fail at some point so always backup.

Short of what has already posted, ie. Disk Warrior / third party, then you may have lost all of the data forever.

 

Glad you got your stuff back, sounds like that Hard drive is going bad. Next time it could be a trip to a data recovery place.

 

Guys, I've been travelling for work so haven't had much time to sort through this, but I have made progress!

I removed the HDD from my mac, threw it into a spare HDD enclosure I had, USB 2.0, plugged it in to my older mac and while it won't recognise the drive in Finder, it DOES recognise it in Disk Utility.

I tried to 'Verify Disk', and instantly it said the Disk has problems. It said it's file structure was damaged, or something along those lines. It also asked me to click 'Repair Disk'... BUT I'm extremely worried that trying to repair the disk with Disk Utility might wipe all the data. What are your experiences with this utility option?? Have you tried it? And did it erase your data or...? Let me know, any advice would be VERY much appreciated.

Thanks!