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whats the best way to recover files on a crashed HD
- Thread starter mac17
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If you have the money, you need a data recovery service. A couple thousand $$$.
BACK UP REGULARLY!!!!
Or you can throw it in an external HD enclosure and use the UNIX command <dd> to copy as much of the information as you can to a new hard drive. No idea whether that'll work.
Or put it in the freezer a couple hours and try again.
Or move the platters to another hard drive of the same type and specs.
BACK UP REGULARLY!!!!
Or you can throw it in an external HD enclosure and use the UNIX command <dd> to copy as much of the information as you can to a new hard drive. No idea whether that'll work.
Or put it in the freezer a couple hours and try again.
Or move the platters to another hard drive of the same type and specs.
well i was working on it (very light stuff just organizing it a bit) and it just shut down i restarted and there was nothing at all on the computer
If its not making any noise or anything, try to boot to an external device such as a firewire drive. Then try to access the disk to see if you can access it. If you can get your data off. If you can't try to run disk utility on it with the verify and repair disk, however people have mixed feelings on this. However, if your not going to shell out at least 100$ bucks for software that might or might not work or have a data recovery (costly) then this is better then trying nothing.
This does not sound like the symptoms of a physical failure. More likely, the disk directory is corrupted. I'd suggest purchasing a commercial disk recovery application like Disk Warrior. It can rescue some pretty far gone hard drives.
I also suggest attempting to start the crashed Mac in Target Disk Mode and seeing if the drive mounts on another Mac with a Firewire cable.
Don't push the panic button just yet.
A hard drive can "click" and start misbehaving when it's overheating. Cooling it down may allow it to start working again (at least for a while), in which case backing up all your data (preferably in small chunks to prevent another overheating) is a very good idea™...
...not sure it applies in this case, though...
Hold down the alt option key for several seconds upon pressing the power button. Then a screen will come up with bootable devices for you to select.
He's basically suggest you do what I do and boot over an external device, I think.
No, I understand now.
He wants to you to Press T down after pressing the power button until the firewire symbol comes up. this makes it act as a external firewire drive that you can connect to another apple computer. Sorry for the confusion and misinformation, but same concept.
He wants to you to Press T down after pressing the power button until the firewire symbol comes up. this makes it act as a external firewire drive that you can connect to another apple computer. Sorry for the confusion and misinformation, but same concept.
That's right, hold down the "T" key when you restart the Mac, until the display shows a blue screen and a Firewire symbol appears, while it is connected to another Mac with a Firewire cable. If the drive is not too badly messed up, it will appear on the desktop of the host Mac, as if was an external drive. You can now run Disk Utility on it, to check for damage. You can also copy off anything you need to backup from the drive onto the host Mac. This is step one. If the drive doesn't mount on the host Mac, then you need to move onto step two. Let us know how it goes.
BTW, I'm not totally convinced that there's anything wrong with your hard drive. Based on your description of the symptoms (which is a little vague, frankly), a number of other issues could be at work.
BTW, I'm not totally convinced that there's anything wrong with your hard drive. Based on your description of the symptoms (which is a little vague, frankly), a number of other issues could be at work.
Sometimes it will start up, get to the grey screen, and shut down again. I've seen this symptom on a Mac with a drive which had a badly corrupted directory (caused in this case by a power outage). A session with Disk Warrior fixed it.
Retrieving unprocessed movies from crahed imac
Hi, I stumbled over this forum through a desperate google search, maybe you can help me. I am an ordinary mac user, not a computer "wizzard", so please be patient with me, and use the simplest possible terminology. Well my iMac crashed a couple of hours ago. It shows a ? folder at start. I put operating system Disc one and looked up disk utility. Well, it doesn't see my hard drive anywhere, sadly. I did hold my whole computer (not sure how to take out the drive from iMac) outside in freezing temperatures, it didn't help, still no hard drive. I am going to take it in into repair tomorrow as it is under warranty. I do have a time capsule (which has been full, not sure if it was backing up my files anymore), I am pretty positive I can retrieve quite a few files and photo folders. What concerns me the most are movies. I uploaded 5 years of movies into iMovie, but didin't have time to go though them and burn DVDs, turn them into functional movie files. They are just uploads from my camera, not all originals are saved on the camera anymore. Last time my imac crashed a few years ago, tech guys backed up everything for me, but movies. They all came as broken images, thumbnails, all out of order. Any tips or advice on retrieving unprocessed movie data from my crashed hard drive? I sure greatly appreciate any help. Thank you. Anna
Hi, I stumbled over this forum through a desperate google search, maybe you can help me. I am an ordinary mac user, not a computer "wizzard", so please be patient with me, and use the simplest possible terminology.
Well my iMac crashed a couple of hours ago. It shows a ? folder at start. I put operating system Disc one and looked up disk utility. Well, it doesn't see my hard drive anywhere, sadly. I did hold my whole computer (not sure how to take out the drive from iMac) outside in freezing temperatures, it didn't help, still no hard drive. I am going to take it in into repair tomorrow as it is under warranty. I do have a time capsule (which has been full, not sure if it was backing up my files anymore), I am pretty positive I can retrieve quite a few files and photo folders. What concerns me the most are movies. I uploaded 5 years of movies into iMovie, but didin't have time to go though them and burn DVDs, turn them into functional movie files. They are just uploads from my camera, not all originals are saved on the camera anymore. Last time my imac crashed a few years ago, tech guys backed up everything for me, but movies. They all came as broken images, thumbnails, all out of order. Any tips or advice on retrieving unprocessed movie data from my crashed hard drive? I sure greatly appreciate any help. Thank you. AnnaHi, I stumbled over this forum through a desperate google search, maybe you can help me. I am an ordinary mac user, not a computer "wizzard", so please be patient with me, and use the simplest possible terminology.
if you can remove the drive, you can put it in an enclosure and mount it with another system and "should" be able to see the filesystem. there are several bootable cd's that will also allow you to do this and can copy the files off to another drive.
been known to work. maybe some small piece of metal is making contact freezing the hdd shrinks the metal a bit small short is gone for a while. clone the drive and hope.
Sorry mac17 for highjacking your thread....
Anna... Sorry to hear this. If your computer is still under warranty, do not attmpt to take the hard dive out of the iMac, as it will void your warranty. Also, do not take the computer out into the freezing temperature - I assume there is snow there, and the change in temperatures will cause condensation and can ruin the whole computer and void your warranty too.
What exactly happened, what went on when it crashed? Do you have another mac in your household?
If not, and if booting from the install DVD and trying to repair permissions with disk utility doesn't work, I suggest you take into the Apple shop and and wait for their diagnose. Do not panic and try random things, as it often cause people to make things worse.
Now, about your Time Capsule Backup.... did you have it working with Time Machine? If so, did you exclude any specific folders from the backup? What do you mean by "almost full"? Is the capacity of your Time Capsule smaller than the capacity of your iMac hard drive?
If you didn't exclude any folders or partitions from the Time Machine backup, and the capacity of the capsule is bigger or equal of that of your HD, then don't worry: all you information should be there in its latest state. Time Machine keeps a copy of everything on your computer, and when the backup drive fills out, it will delete the oldest copies of your system.... but it will always keep at least the latest version, including your movies... so don't panic too much - chances are you have everything backed up.
If you have another mac in your household, you can use it to see how much of your data is backed up in the time capsule, either directly by connecting the other mac to the Time Capsule - but be careful not to delete anything - or by using a utility such as BackinTime.
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I can testify first hand that it works in some cases.
I managed to save a huge amount of data from my wife's laptop drive in a similar way. I moved the bad drive to a cheap external enclosure. Noted it would work only for a few minutes before failing -- basically it would stop when it got warm. Solution was to sandwich the external enclosure between ice-packs while extracting the files.
Note: Be careful about condensation if you do this or the freezer trick!
Spidey!!!