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Drive Recovery Help

Tesselator

Tesselator

macrumors 601
Original poster
Jan 9, 2008
4,601
6
Japan
Mac Pro 1,1, OSX 10.6.1

Heh! Well, I done it now.. :p Some weeks ago I took out a 1TB drive from it's internal position and placed it in a USB cradle. Started up and Spotlight decided to index "my computer" which took 45 min. During that time the USB plug "disconnected" and reconnected several times as the cord was gently bumped several times. It finished and mounted and I read and wrote to it several times - less than or about 1GB all total

Today I turn on the power to the cradle and the volume cannot be viewed - just a blank window of the mounted volume with no file structure. It says "Max OS X cannot repair the volume" in a little popup dialogue which also explains that I may read from it but not write and that I should do a copy or recovery of the files. I replaced the unit back into it's sledded position (Bay 2) and received the same errors and troubles. Spotlight is also indexing my computer again which it says will take about 2 hours. I dunno if it's indexing the troubled 1TB drive but I suspect it's not - I dunno.

In SpeedTools Media Scanner I can scan the individual files of the volume. It says there are 460,006 files and I scanned to about 75,000 before I aborted - I just wanted to see if they could be read and they can. Still looks empty in finder though. ST Scanner reports that there are 870 GB used so that's a file size average of 1.891 MB per file so I guess almost all files are accounted for.

In SpeedTools QuickBack there's an option to "copy" a volume to a "QuickBack Archive" which is simply a DMG file it had me "create" on my 4.1 TB RAID0. It's doing that as I type now but I dunno what the exact outcome will be. It looks like it could be anywhere from a 2 to an 8 hour operation depending what it does in what stages.


My questions:
  • Any experiences or references you can post or point me to that will teach me the most optimal way to deal with this situation?

  • Any software you recommend that deals with something like this?

  • Any other ideas or comments?

Any Mac Pro specific information I might need to consider?

Thanks!



.
 
nothing specific to mac pro...

... sic disk warrior on it. I've recovered information from countless drives under similar circumstances.
 
Update:

I used TechTool -> Tools -> Data Recovery -> Protection (Directory Backup from 9/8/09) -> Folder Locate "Torrents", and am copying over 300 Gigs to the RAID set as I type this. The platter made a high-pitch scratching noise (OMG!) but read the folder contents OK and is copying. After this is done I have to think of a search string that will search out and list the root level folders - all. And then I'll try backing each one of those up. I wonder if it's smart enough to handle paths? :p


By the way, Disk Warrior has:
  • About DiskWarrior,
  • Graph Usage and Rebuild Directory,
  • Repair Disk Permissions,
  • Check Files and Folders for damage,
  • Manually "Test" the drive",
  • Schedule and notify drive tests.
And that's it. None of those things do anything useful. I need something that can on its own scan for root level folders and copy the contents to another drive.

I'm pretty sure DiskWarrior isn't capable of doing anything useful (err, that I need here). I tried the DW -> Rebuild Directory option and it read for 5 seconds and then erred out, leaving the drive unmounted and un-remountable. :p
 
I've used a program called File Salvage on disks that were dead with pretty good luck. It does take time to recover files and will typically pick up stuff that I have no interest in, which I then have to sift through. However, it worked when nothing else would.
 
Rainier42 said:
I've used a program called File Salvage on disks that were dead with pretty good luck. It does take time to recover files and will typically pick up stuff that I have no interest in, which I then have to sift through. However, it worked when nothing else would.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that looks like exactly what I want:

  • Recovers files from corrupt media – Data corruption does not stop FileSalvage from working. In fact it will happily process an entire corrupted file system for intact data and recover whole or partial files wherever it finds them.

  • FileSalvage works on faulty hardware - FileSalvage can also recover data from mechanically unsound devices. The software uses several tried and tested methods, which in addition SubRosaSoft has improved upon, to read the same piece of information and to automatically skip of areas of the file system that are fully unreadable. By employing these methods, FileSalvage is able to recover data from sources that may have appeared to other software to be too physically broken to use.


Kewl, thanks!

I wonder if there's others like it or if it's like the only one?
 
Update:

File Salvage doesn't try to find folders. Just file types and everything "recovered" is grouped by file-type across the entire 800+ GBs and it looks like it renames everything too. LOL! Oh well, I thought this looked good too. Dang!


Next. :)
 
It's risky but if you know how the drive geometry was laid out, you could recreate the partitions, mount it, and move on. Given this is on OS X, I doubt you have that information unfortunately.
 
Yup, that's absolutely the right one (err, I think). ;)

Thanks!

That QuickScan read the entire folder-tree in about 4 seconds and it's now happily recovering all the folder structures and contained files. YAY!

It's reading the single green drive at an average of 62 MB/s (so far) so it's as fast or faster than shell script or finder action.

Nice! Thanks again for the tip!
 
Tesselator said:
Yup, that's absolutely the right one (err, I think). ;)

Thanks!

That QuickScan read the entire folder-tree in about 4 seconds and it's now happily recovering all the folder structures and contained files. YAY!

It's reading the single green drive at an average of 62 MB/s (so far) so it's as fast or faster than shell script or finder action.

Nice! Thanks again for the tip!
Click to expand...

No problem, I use it to help recover data from my old SoftRAID setup when one of the drives decided to go weird on me... The application is very determined in my opinion, it'll keep on trying, even when it can't read the damaged sector.... especially when all other applications have long since stopped, quit due to non-responsiveness..

Hope it gets everything back for you!
 
If you can get access to a PC, get Spinrite from GRC.com. It's in a different class from the above mentioned programs. Likely the drive lost connection while writing to an important sector and "exploded" it, so it can't be read now. If you connect the drive to a pc and run spinrite, it'll do a very low level examination of the drive and repair the sector, or alternatively, if it can't repair the sector you're pretty much hosed anyway.

It's like 70 or 80 bucks, but well worth the money.

BTW, it won't run on a mac b/c it's written in assembly language and won't work on a machine w/o a BIOS (and modern macs use EFI).

Good luck.
 
Tesselator said:
Data Rescue III did the trick. All done, perfect in-tact, full recovery, 820 GB in about 100 minutes.

Definitely worth the price of admission! ;)
Click to expand...

Glad to hear it... It's a great little utility, it's saved my ass on few occasions, definitely worth the money. I find File Salvage is only good when it comes to undeleting data from removable media such as memory cards.
 
Yeah, that was my impression of it too. I think it's good if you know a few specific file names that you want to pick out and "save". It's not made for recovering large numbers of files like one might find on a system disk - for sure.
 
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