Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

dead hard drive after blackout!

H

hwalters

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 25, 2008
4
0
Oh i hope I posted to the right forum. My internal seagate is...just....gone....the power flickered here the other day and of course my mac shut down. When I turned it back on, my 2nd hard drive (with the old system 10.3.9) kicked in. Disk Utility, Disk Warrior do not show the Seagate hard drive, I tried looking it up in terminal, it does not show there. Frankly, the only place I can even sort of find it is in single-user mode, where when I boot into it, it tells me that "AppleK2SATA@0 phy detected but drive not in ready state"....it then tells me that drive status is: CL=ff, CH=ff, SC=ff, SN=ff, AltStat=ff, (whatever that all means).
I tried a fsck but it only checks the 2nd hard drive (the NOW boot drive).
I tried taking out the 2nd hard drive and running a fsck on (through trial and error) disk0s2 (which I think was its device name once I took the spare HD out, and slapped in the OSX CD so I could get into single-user mode). It told me that:
sectors could not be read: 4,5,6,7
I tried zapping PRAM, and interestingly when I did that, now when I boot up, it takes my system several minutes to find the 2nd drive, like it's looking for the first one (the missing one) and has to settle for where it can find system software.
Am I screwed?
 
Was your Mac plugged into a surge protector? Unless you had a major power surge, I doubt the blackout had anything to do with this. Even if you did have a surge... the chances of it killing only your hard drive seems slim. My guess is that it's just a coincidence that your HD drive died when the power went out.
 
It was NOT plugged into the surge protector, as I unfortunately discovered today. I also noticed when trying to get it working the fans went into overdrive (so apparently this meltdown is just that....a failure from extreme overheating).....I should mention that the hard drive does get power, it does spin, and it does make its little happy clicking noises for a few seconds when computer is powered on, (not the bad, yr-hard-drive-is-failing clicking noises). I currently am trying a last resort: sticking the hd in the freezer.
 
Did you try swapping the two drives you have? So that the broken one is connected to the interface of the functioning one? That way you will exclude it's an interface problem.
 
Update: It's been in the freezer for almost a week and still, nothin. I bought an enclosure, and the hd still is not visible, although my system profiler shows a generic "mass storage device" in my USB connections. Disk Utility, Drive Genius, and Disk Warrior do not detect the drive though and according to the documentation for this enclosure I'm supposed to use Disk Utility to format the drive....but it ain't showin up in there either.
I have hooked up my old HD (so I can use this computer!) and have tried sticking the broken one in the 2nd port, and booting from the old HD, but this one does not show up. Do SATAs do the whole slave master thing? Can I put the broken HD into the enclosure and somehow turn it into a slave? Or do I take it to a data recovery guy?
 
hwalters said:
Update: It's been in the freezer for almost a week and still, nothin. I bought an enclosure, and the hd still is not visible, although my system profiler shows a generic "mass storage device" in my USB connections. Disk Utility, Drive Genius, and Disk Warrior do not detect the drive though and according to the documentation for this enclosure I'm supposed to use Disk Utility to format the drive....but it ain't showin up in there either.
I have hooked up my old HD (so I can use this computer!) and have tried sticking the broken one in the 2nd port, and booting from the old HD, but this one does not show up. Do SATAs do the whole slave master thing? Can I put the broken HD into the enclosure and somehow turn it into a slave? Or do I take it to a data recovery guy?
Click to expand...

Right. I'm going to refer you to my previous post. The hard drive is gone. It's time to accept the loss and move on. I bet you'll back up your stuff now! :p

Technically, I think a data recovery specialist could recover the data, but it would probably cost thousands of dollars (a "data recovery guy" isn't going to be able to do it).

http://services.seagate.com/
 
one more try before I give up: what about dd in terminal? I've been reading that you can get data off dead drives, even ones with hard physical errors....
 
hwalters said:
I bought an enclosure, and the hd still is not visible, although my system profiler shows a generic "mass storage device" in my USB connections. Disk Utility, Drive Genius, and Disk Warrior do not detect the drive though and according to the documentation for this enclosure I'm supposed to use Disk Utility to format the drive....but it ain't showin up in there either.
Click to expand...
You might want to give SpinRite a shot since your HD shows as a device.

SpinRite has worked for me when DU, DG and DW have not.

Just need a PC to use SpinRite.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back