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Jayhawk Raven

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 21, 2015
63
8
Kansas
I am trying to recover some photos from an old Mac mini HD. The machine would not boot, and would not boot into safe mode. It has reportedly been in that condition for over five years. The Mac mini was a 2006 model. The HD is a Seagate Momentus 5400 2 (80 GB). Other than trying to boot the machine, nothing was tried five years ago when the problem started.

So, I removed the HD and connected it to my MBP with a USB to SATA Hard Disk Drive Converter.

The disk did not mount in finder.

Using Disk Utility the disk was visible, but not mounted. (There was just an outline of the drive.). It showed a size of 79.68 GB. It also showed “USB External Physical Volume • Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”

The "get info" results:
Volume name : Macintosh HD​
Volume type : Physical Volume​
BSD device node : disk2s2​
File system : Mac OS Extended (Journaled)​
Connection : USB​
Device tree path : IODeviceTree:/PCI0@0/XHC1@14​
Writable : Yes​
Is case-sensitive : No​
File system UUID : E0E13E5B-6E8E-3F8D-9B4A-1F8ADADC5590​
Volume capacity : 79,682,387,968​
Owners enabled : No​
Is encrypted : No​
Can be verified : Yes​
Can be repaired : Yes​
Bootable : No​
Journaled : No​
Disk number : 2​
Partition number : 2​
Media name :​
Media type : Generic​
Ejectable : Yes​
Solid state : No​
S.M.A.R.T. status : Not Supported​
Parent disks : disk2​


I tried to run First Aid. After a moment I received this response:

Running First Aid on “Macintosh HD” (disk2s2)​
Repairing file system.​
Volume is already unmounted.​
Performing fsck_hfs -fy -x /dev/rdisk2s2​
File system check exit code is 8.​
Restoring the original state found as unmounted.​
File system verify or repair failed.​
Operation failed…​



I clicked "mount" and the drive started spinning, which lasted for several minutes, with no results.



I went into Terminal and typed diskutil list
Results:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):​
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER​
0: GUID_partition_scheme *251.0 GB disk0​
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1​
2: Apple_APFS Container disk1 250.8 GB disk0s2​
/dev/disk1 (synthesized):​
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER​
0: APFS Container Scheme - +250.8 GB disk1​
Physical Store disk0s2​
1: APFS Volume Macintosh HD 160.8 GB disk1s1​
2: APFS Volume Preboot 46.3 MB disk1s2​
3: APFS Volume Recovery 510.4 MB disk1s3​
4: APFS Volume VM 1.1 GB disk1s4​
/dev/disk2 (external, physical):​
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER​
0: GUID_partition_scheme *80.0 GB disk2​
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk2s1​
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 79.7 GB disk2s2​



Any ideas?
 
OP:

Try this, will hurt nothing.

a. Power down the Mac, DISCONNECT the externally-mounted drive
b. Power the Mac, get to the finder
c. NOW connect the external drive
d. Doesn't mount? DON'T DO ANYTHING. Just "let it sit" for about 20-30 minutes.
e. See if the finder (finding a drive that won't mount) will try to "repair" it and get it mounted.

Again, this won't hurt anything.
Worth a try. Sometimes it works!
 
What kind of adapter is this? If it's just USB to SATA I wonder if it is not providing enough power to the drive. Does your MBP have USB 3?
 
I think DiskWarrior also have some sort of genius support where you call and tell them what is wrong and they tell you what to do, and I think there is also the option to send your HDD and they can fix it for you.
 
I think DiskWarrior also have some sort of genius support where you call and tell them what is wrong and they tell you what to do, and I think there is also the option to send your HDD and they can fix it for you.

For the "genius support", I would think one would need to be a registered owner of Disk Warrior. And if
one is, most of what "genius support" is going to tell you can be accomplished by using the software.
 
Last edited:
Haven't heard back from the OP.

OP:
Have you had any success?

If the drive has failed "physically" (something actually broken inside), you're probably not getting the data back, unless you send it to a data recovery outfit which will disassemble and work on it (VERY expensive).

Tell us about what you're using to connect the drive to another Mac.
 
I apologize for not updating you. I :thought: I had.

I was using a USB to SATA adapter to connect to the drive. I forgot about it and left it plugged in. An hour later I went to close Disk Utility and found that the disk had mounted. It stayed mounted long enough for me to copy the drive.

I do appreciate the advice.
 
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