Hello everyone! I had an "incident" recently that I'm still attempting to recover from and I'm soliciting any advice I can in order to solve the problem as quickly as possible. I recently bought a WD 320 GB HD to install in my newer MBP (2.33 17").
Knowing nothing of anything, I immediately partitioned the new drive for a future install of Windoz XP and cloned my internal drive to the larger partition of the new drive. I then swapped drives...
Much to my horror, it turns out I wasn't suppose to partition the drive after all because Boot Camp does that keeping one partition HFS+ and the other one FAT32 for Windoz. But that wasn't the big hairy deal. I didn't want to back all the way out and start over from scratch by un-swapping drives. I tried to correct my mistake with the drives swapped. I had a copy of Leopard and tried to install it on the new drive, now internal. It failed the first several attempts. I went on to message boards and after reading how flaky 10.5.0 is I decided to keep plugging away. Finally, it seemed to take but when I went to boot up, it failed. The drive was useless in this configuration.
I panicked. I booted off of the original drive, now external, and tried to install Leopard on that and it wiped my user account off completely and all the settings and files associated with it... including several years of pictures I had stored there. Before taking things apart and stuff I had also saved a copy of the drive on an external 500 GB WD drive just in case. But panic was still ruling the day and I tried to install Leopard on that drive too, just to see my user account deleted off of it as well. Furthermore, that drive became fundamentally corrupted and is barely limping along at the moment.
The original install kept coming up with an error: Drive needs to be formatted G.U.I.D. and, at the time, I'd never heard of this term. Turns out this was my fatal error. When I partitioned the new drive, I didn't know to make it GUID (why this isn't set as the default is beyond me), and so it wasn't formatted that way. While the clone worked fine, as soon as I went to install 10.5, it caused things to really become screwy. And when it "succeeded" in finally installing 10.5, it didn't make it any more usable. To "solve" the problem, I was forced to back all the way to square one by physically re-swapping the drives. I then was forced to reformat and install 10.4.x with the disc that came with the computer new. Then I installed 10.5 and updated that to 10.5.2 via the internet. At this time I was under the impression that any important data I had on the 160 GB drive would be recoverable later on and I'd have all my MP3s and jpgs etc. once I recovered the files with a file recovery program. After correctly formatting the new drive and then cloning the old drive to it and installing it in the computer, it works perfectly and I was even able to successfully install Windoz in it via Boot Camp. Now I'm in recovery mode.
I lost all my emails and address book and I have no idea how to recover those files, where to look for them. I've managed to recover most of the MP3s I thought I'd lost because they were originally stored on the 500 GB drive and they weren't written over or damaged (too much) throughout this ordeal. I wasn't able to recover them all, however, as some of the blocks on the drive have been corrupted and are unreadable. I bought a copy of Data Recovery II by Prosoft and I'm using it in the data recovery process, but it does not repair drives. I did a scan of the original drive where all this lost information should be but came up empty. I can't remember now which scans I've run on it, so I'll probably have to run them again. I'm currently in the process of scanning (deleted files scan) the 500 GB drive and it's on its third day of scanning and it's just under half done with the 350 GB HFS+ partition. My wife needs me to find the pictures quickly but I've told her I can't make it scan any quicker. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can be more productive with my time during this process, targeting just what I need and recovering my user name from the original drive for instance? I'm at a loss here as to what more I can do. Should I find some software somewhere that can repair my large drive so I can scan and recover files quicker? Is this even possible? Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks
Knowing nothing of anything, I immediately partitioned the new drive for a future install of Windoz XP and cloned my internal drive to the larger partition of the new drive. I then swapped drives...
Much to my horror, it turns out I wasn't suppose to partition the drive after all because Boot Camp does that keeping one partition HFS+ and the other one FAT32 for Windoz. But that wasn't the big hairy deal. I didn't want to back all the way out and start over from scratch by un-swapping drives. I tried to correct my mistake with the drives swapped. I had a copy of Leopard and tried to install it on the new drive, now internal. It failed the first several attempts. I went on to message boards and after reading how flaky 10.5.0 is I decided to keep plugging away. Finally, it seemed to take but when I went to boot up, it failed. The drive was useless in this configuration.
I panicked. I booted off of the original drive, now external, and tried to install Leopard on that and it wiped my user account off completely and all the settings and files associated with it... including several years of pictures I had stored there. Before taking things apart and stuff I had also saved a copy of the drive on an external 500 GB WD drive just in case. But panic was still ruling the day and I tried to install Leopard on that drive too, just to see my user account deleted off of it as well. Furthermore, that drive became fundamentally corrupted and is barely limping along at the moment.
The original install kept coming up with an error: Drive needs to be formatted G.U.I.D. and, at the time, I'd never heard of this term. Turns out this was my fatal error. When I partitioned the new drive, I didn't know to make it GUID (why this isn't set as the default is beyond me), and so it wasn't formatted that way. While the clone worked fine, as soon as I went to install 10.5, it caused things to really become screwy. And when it "succeeded" in finally installing 10.5, it didn't make it any more usable. To "solve" the problem, I was forced to back all the way to square one by physically re-swapping the drives. I then was forced to reformat and install 10.4.x with the disc that came with the computer new. Then I installed 10.5 and updated that to 10.5.2 via the internet. At this time I was under the impression that any important data I had on the 160 GB drive would be recoverable later on and I'd have all my MP3s and jpgs etc. once I recovered the files with a file recovery program. After correctly formatting the new drive and then cloning the old drive to it and installing it in the computer, it works perfectly and I was even able to successfully install Windoz in it via Boot Camp. Now I'm in recovery mode.
I lost all my emails and address book and I have no idea how to recover those files, where to look for them. I've managed to recover most of the MP3s I thought I'd lost because they were originally stored on the 500 GB drive and they weren't written over or damaged (too much) throughout this ordeal. I wasn't able to recover them all, however, as some of the blocks on the drive have been corrupted and are unreadable. I bought a copy of Data Recovery II by Prosoft and I'm using it in the data recovery process, but it does not repair drives. I did a scan of the original drive where all this lost information should be but came up empty. I can't remember now which scans I've run on it, so I'll probably have to run them again. I'm currently in the process of scanning (deleted files scan) the 500 GB drive and it's on its third day of scanning and it's just under half done with the 350 GB HFS+ partition. My wife needs me to find the pictures quickly but I've told her I can't make it scan any quicker. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can be more productive with my time during this process, targeting just what I need and recovering my user name from the original drive for instance? I'm at a loss here as to what more I can do. Should I find some software somewhere that can repair my large drive so I can scan and recover files quicker? Is this even possible? Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks
