Data recovery of a mac drive from a PC...

[BurlingtonITGuy.com]

So I've got this external drive that was used on a mac, the customer said they pulled the USB cable out accidentally and then it stopped showing up on the mac, I said I could take a look at it and could probably help them out, thinking it's filesystem corruption.

I don't have a mac myself, but have "mac drive" installed on my PC, it sees the external drive, but when trying to access the contents just hangs. I tried testdisk, it also sees the drive, and partition, but as it tries to read it, it gets read errors on every part it tries to read.

I ran Seatools for windows on the USB drive, and it failed a short generic test, as far as I understand this is a disk test, not filesystem, so the formatting of the disk should be irrelevant... so far I'm lead to believe that the drive is actually bad, but I can't see why if all they did was unplug the USB cable.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

 

[Encrypted Existence]

so far I'm lead to believe that the drive is actually bad, but I can't see why if all they did was unplug the USB cable.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

If SeaTools failed the drive then it's bad. Who knows if the customer is telling you the whole truth. "I just pulled the USB cable out accidentally..." <<< What they are telling you. "...and yanked the entire drive off of the table to hit the floor." <<< What they aren't telling you. THIS IS JUST A MADE UP SCENARIO AND THE DRIVE MAY BE FAILING FOR A NUMBER OF REASONS. I guess my point is that it really doesn't matter why the drive is failing. Personally I don't take what customers say too heavily. My advice is to explain to the customer that the drive is failing and give them their options...whatever they may be.

 

[BurlingtonITGuy.com]

Thanks for the reply! I agree, who knows what actually happened, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't misdiagnosing it by not knowing some super secret rule of hfs formatted drives that would fail disk tests lol.

 

[anonymous Mac Tech]

I ran Seatools for windows on the USB drive, and it failed a short generic test, as far as I understand this is a disk test, not filesystem, so the formatting of the disk should be irrelevant... so far I'm lead to believe that the drive is actually bad, but I can't see why if all they did was unplug the USB cable.

The drive could have been failing for a while or it could even be the enclosure causing the diag failure. Not ejecting the drive properly most likely hosed it out so it won't mount.

Get a clone of the drive using your cloning tool of choice (personally I use Data Rescue III). Then you will probably need a directory structure repair tool like DiskWarrior. You may be able to just use DiskWarrior alone to get the drive to mount, but seeing as it is already failing diags I'd clone it first because DiskWarrior can be pretty taxing on a failing drive. I can usually just see how the drive is acting and make a judgement call on how to utilize what the drive will need to be recoverable. The problem is you'll need a Mac to run these tools and they are not free.

 

[Zippin]

Like Anon mac tech says, Its going to be a hard nut to crack without a Mac. However, i have come across a fair share of situations where the enclosure was faulty rather than the HD. I would get the HD out of the enclosure( if its a SATA/IDE) and run it off a dock to the customers Mac and see if it mounts. If it doesn't mount on the Desktop, see if it shows on "Disk Utilities" in (Finder/Applications/utilities) If it does, repair the disk from there. Its not the same as "Disk Warrior" but sometimes does the job.

 

[BurlingtonITGuy.com]

Thanks Guys,

the other annoying thing is that it's a 3TB drive, quite hard to image as I don't have any 3TB drives lol, ah well, I'll post back here once I figure something out.

 

[RedFoxComp]

Thanks Guys,

the other annoying thing is that it's a 3TB drive, quite hard to image as I don't have any 3TB drives lol, ah well, I'll post back here once I figure something out.

R-Studio will do it. Along with almost every other scenario; rebuilding a RAID using disk images etc. Awesome software but you need to read the (extensive) manual.

Take it out of the enclosure and, using R-Studio, make a disk image of the drive immediately after hooking it up, then do the recovery on the disk image.

http://www.r-studio.com/

"File systems supported: FAT (FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT), NTFS, NTFS5 (created or updated by Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista/2008/Win7), HFS/HFS+ (Macintosh), Little and Big Endian variants of UFS1/UFS2 (FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD/Solaris) and Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 FS (Linux) on local hard disks."

 

[iisjman07]

I'd recommend booting up an Ubuntu distro first; it's not as fussy when mounting potentially failing partitions/disks.

 

[sal13]

I have had some luck with hfsexplorer. It was a similar situation in that macdrive just hung when I tried to read the disk. But hsfexplorer saw the disk and I was able to copy individual folders and files off to my PC. Running proper mac utilities, like disk warrior and the ones mentioned would be best. But if they are not an option this might be worth a try. Sorry I cannot post links yet, but it will be the first result in google.
-Sal

 

[twincountycomputers]

I'd recommend booting up an Ubuntu distro first; it's not as fussy when mounting potentially failing partitions/disks.

2nd that ubuntu, I've used it several times to read good and bad mac drives

 

[bipsa]

You can try for recovery utility such as mac drive recovery software that is designed with thorough scanning algorithms and not only scan & retrieve drive data with efficiency but also helps restore those at destination desired in the manner most easy of all. So, if you want you can free download the utility for scanning your mac volume & to see the preview of files, if the same are recoverable otherwise not.