Here's another vote for Data Rescue III. Another app that does the same thing is "Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery". I've never tried it, but my guess is that it will work as well as DR3.
Provisos:
- You WILL need ANOTHER hard drive that is the size of the one you're trying to "recover from". DR3 and SPDR don't try to "fix" the bad hard drive. Instead, they just "scavenge" it for data, and [having found data] try to rebuild the files that are there (but otherwise can't be "seen" due to directory damage).
- It can take a L-O-N-G time for these apps to do their thing. We're talking hours or perhaps a couple of days. That's the way it works.
- It might take MORE THAN ONE TRY for success.
- You might get a good portion of your data back, but I wouldn't count on getting it ALL back. Them's the breaks.
- You'll probably lose all your "folder hierarchies" that existed on the original drive. Remember that these hierarchies are a creation of the directory on the original [bad] drive, and if that directory is munged, the recovery apps might "find" the files, but won't have any reference as to how to organize them. Expect to have a LOT of "post-recovery" re-organizing if you had many many files. Again, them's the breaks.
- Consider trying to recover only portions of the original drive, not all of it. By that, I mean your "home folder", etc., while letting the System files alone. The reason is it may take less time and involve less re-organizing than trying to recover a System folder, which is many thousands of files and might be just-as-easily-restored through a software re-install. I know that DR3 will let you scavenge and search for certain types of files.
- Keep in mind that [I believe] DR3 (and probably SPDR as well) may need for the volume in question to be "mountable" before they can "attack" it. In my case, I was trying to recover files on a corrupted partition. The drive's OTHER partitions would mount, but NOT the one I needed to have mounted. Ultimately, the only thing that worked was for me to completely RE-INITIALIZE the entire drive, destroying the previous directories and partitions. I could then mount the disk, and DR3 "got at" the files I was looking for (mp3 files).
All this isn't easy, but it CAN be done with patience. Good luck!
Might just be a coincident but this happened after I unplugged the Mac for about a month. I've tried to reset the PRAM, no go. I have Windows XP using bootcamp, could some Windows virus formatted the drive?
