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Hard drive issue, want pictures back

53kyle

53kyle

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Mar 27, 2012
1,282
111
Sebastopol, CA
My 1 year old seagate drive has gotten corrupt to many times to count, but this new issue is worse. It started out that the computer would show a bar under the apple logo, and after it loaded half way the computer would shut down, like the many other times, but then I booted off of an external drive (which I use with a different Mac now, and have put mountain lion on, which is incompatible with my old one) and started backing up, and then bam, my computer kernel panicked, which it used to do a lot, and when I turned it back on, the hard drive wasn't on the desktop or disk utility like it used to be. I then put it in my pc and booted spin rite, which usually worked, and it wouldn't see the hard drive, so I went into bios and checked and it was there, but it said (and still does) 0 mb. My other of was the same, but spin rite saw the hard drive and spit out an error. I have tried Ubuntu and windows, both of which saw it. They both said 0mb and that it was unformatted. Windows said to initialize it, but i have thousands of pictures on it. Is there a way to fix it on either windows or Ubuntu free?

PS, I don't know if this is the right place to put this thread, so move if it is wrong.

PPS, Windows and Ubuntu both say that there are 0 sectors
 
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Does anyone have any programs they can suggest? Also, is it possible for somebody to explain what is going on?
 
chibiterasu said:
Have you tired seatools http://www.seagate.com/support/down...toid=552bd20cacdec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD You could always try gparted live cd google around for that and how to use it. But It doesnt sound sound good this failure I had a usb drive go into a .raw format and the only way I could get it back was to formatted it and I lost a ton of work. Hope you manage to do better than me:)
Click to expand...

Yes I have tried seatools, and it only checks, doesn't repair. Another weird thing is that one windows program I tried said "corrupt master boot record" , what does that mean? One more thing I forgot to mention is that it used to click, which oddly, was the only time it would come up on disk utility, again, saying 0mb and no partitions

EDIT: I am in the same situation, because I am eligible for free replacement, but I will lose my stuff
 
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old-wiz said:
if you knew you were having trouble with the disk, why in the world didn't you make a backup somewhere?
Click to expand...

I did make a backup, but like I am pretty sure I said in my first post, the hard drive failed when a kernel panic happened when I started the backup. Time machine had deleted my other one (made a month ago)
 
So, I guess that this thread is dead and I just have to pay 500-2000, which I could be using that money towards an upgrade from a 2006 laptop, not paying for either seagate's crappy job at making reliable hard drives! Please, professionals, help me!
 
I'm guessing that Windows and Linux don't see the hard drive (or report 0 MB free space) because the drive is formatted as GUID. They simply can't read the partition and report that the disk is full. So don't let that cause any extra worrying.

I'd assume the drive is dead or dying.
You should remove the hard drive now. Anything you do to it will only increase the odds that you lose the data that is on it.
Buy a new hard drive (why get a replacement from the same company that sent you the dead one).
Do a fresh install of OS X onto your new drive.
Put the old hard drive in an external USB enclosure.
Plug the USB drive into the Mac and hope you see your files.
After you get your data off, THEN you can talk to Seagate about getting a replacement or refund.

There are some companies that offer hard drive recovery. They claim they can recover data off of a drive no matter how badly they are damaged. Of course, there is also a lot of fine print where you agree to pay them even if they can't get any data. Their service is not cheap (usually thousands of dollars).

Now for the semi-good news: You've learned a very important lesson. Back up your data BEFORE you have computer problems. Setup Time Machine on an external drive.
I'm sorry you learned it the hard way.

Good luck!!!
 
Macman45 said:
You could try Disk Warrior...It's not free, but many here have had good results..If the drive is totalled though, nothing is going to bring it back to life. The only option then is expensive third party data recovery companies.
Click to expand...

Yea, I tried disk warrior and drive genius, neither worked. They didn't show the drive, but I think the spinning beach ball was because of trying to access the drive
 
53kyle said:
Yea, I tried disk warrior and drive genius, neither worked. They didn't show the drive, but I think the spinning beach ball was because of trying to access the drive
Click to expand...

That's a dead drive for sure....I guess only you can decide if the photo's are worth the huge amount of money data recovery people charge. It's a little late, but next time make sure you have backups...The most important its,s in a Mac are not the GPU / Ram etc.

It's your data..

Hope you get fixed up.
 
So this thread has been dead for a while and I might have a big game changer of a question for recovery which is: could a culprit for the 0 sectors be 2 missing pins in a Sata cable?
 
53kyle said:
So this thread has been dead for a while and I might have a big game changer of a question for recovery which is: could a culprit for the 0 sectors be 2 missing pins in a Sata cable?
Click to expand...



Uh... yes. If you're having problems with multiple drives, maybe its not the drive... test/replace cable.
 
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