MacBook Pro - Hard Drive Failing, Need to Recover Data

[jry223]

Greetings fellow MacBook users,

My MacBook Pro (15" screen, late 2008 model) with a 250 GB internal hard drive recently crashed. I was surfing the web when the screen froze. Then, I waited a while to see if it would recover but the computer became very warm and so I manually shut it down. Upon restarting, the computer would not proceed past a gray screen with a spinning circle.

After bringing it to the Apple store, I was told that my hard drive is failing and it will not boot, and that there are i/o errors in the logs.

My main concern is getting the data recovered, as I unfortunately did not have a back-up in place. While I learned my lesson and will be buying an external HD to prevent this in the future, I still need to find an affordable way to recover my data. If anyone has any ideas of what could have happened or how to resolve this problem, I would greatly appreciate the help. Thanks!

 

[deadwulfe]

LifeHacker.com: How to Recover Data with Free Software

I tried the PhotoRec option, recently. Download the TestDisk suite and launch the PhotoRec terminal app from the downloaded folder and follow the directions. You basically want to save the recovered files to a seperate HDD with enough space to fit your whole drive, since it recovers everything without letting you choose what to recover.

It's not elegant, at all, but I think it's one free option worth checking out. Like the article says, there are a lot of good options on Windows.

 

[Corneliuse]

To have any hope of recovering your data, you will need a file recovery tool such as Tech Tool Pro (Micromat) , Data Rescue (Prosoft Engineering), or File Salvage (SubRosaSoft). The chances generally aren't really good, but short of sending your drive to a data recovery service (expensive and by no means guaranteed), such utilities are your only hope.

Good luck.