A family member has a iBook G4 hard drive (summer '04) which recently failed and she does not have a recent backup of her files. We were looking at Mac Medics to try to get some of the data recovered - http://macmedics.com/ - has anyone ever had experience with this company?
If not, does anyone have any ideas on how to get data off of this failed hard drive?
The best way to get data off a failed hard drive is to have a good backup! Unfortunately, at this point it's too late.
I've had luck in the past by placing the failed disk in a freezer over night, and then reconnecting it the next day. Not exactly sure why it is, but something about the cooling processing bringing any damage on the platters back to a readable state. WARNING: If you have a lot of data, you might need to freeze it a couple of times to get everything off of it--as the disk warms up, read errors will occur more frequently. If you do not need to boot from this drive, you'll have more time to read your data properly. This is a very inexpensive solution, and won't help you out with some times of drive failure, but it has been good to me!
If that still doesn't work, then you'll want to look at a data recovery service. I've never used any of them before. Hopefully you won't have to either--they can get expensive real quickly.
