G5 Data Recovery - Novice Advice

[stb2]

I’m attempting a DIY recovery of an old Apple G5-era hard drive (likely around 2004–2006) containing family photos and videos.


Setup:

• Old SATA mechanical hard drive removed from the G5
• Connected via SABRENT USB docking station
• Running on an older MacBook Pro
• Using Disk Drill (older compatible Mac version)
• Currently running “All recovery methods”

Current behaviour:

• The drive mounts successfully
• Disk Drill continuously progresses through blocks/sectors
• No crashes or disconnects so far
• Block count steadily increases
• Scan has now been running for over 36 hours continuously
• Drive gets warm but is being fan cooled and now remains stable
• Occasional soft beeping/squeaking sounds from the drive/dock during reads
• No aggressive clicking noises
• No recovered files/categories populated yet

Questions:

1. Is this type of extremely long-running scan normal on an old failing mechanical drive?
2. Does continued block progression generally suggest the drive is still readable and worth continuing?
3. At what point would experienced people normally stop a scan like this?
4. Would switching from “all recovery methods” to a targeted photo/video-only scan likely speed things up significantly?
5. Am I risking further damage to the drive by continuing this scan?
6. Would a professional recovery service realistically recover data substantially faster, or is the physical health of the drive likely the main limitation here?

Additional context:I also still have many original SD cards, USB sticks and old camera media from the same period, so I’m trying to decide whether continuing this deep scan is worthwhile versus shifting focus onto recovering from the original media instead.


Any advice appreciated from people experienced with old Mac drive recovery.

 

[Bigwaff]

Old SATA mechanical hard drive removed from the G5

Have any idea what the file system type is on the drive? I’m surprised it doesn’t just mount on the older MBP. What year/model MBP and version of macOS installed?

 

[srp]

If it's not clicking/grinding, repeatedly disconnecting then it should be okay. Not sure what kind of test you're running, but `fsck`, `chkdsk`, SMART long tests can sometimes exacerbate the issue. You should ideally have the drive mounted read-only.

The first thing I would do if you suspect the drive is dying is to do a `ddrescue` and make a full clone of the disk. If you have a full image of the disk it becomes a lot harder to make the situation any worse. ddrescue skips bad areas and copies easily readable data first, so if your goal is just to extract usable data, this would be the way to go.

From there, you can run `testdisk`, `photorec` on the .img file and try to pull any data that was missed from the ddrescue pass.

If the data is precious or irreplacable, I would not continue trying to DIY it and instead send it to a professional data recovery service.