Recovering entire MacBook drive

[WeFixIT.ie]

Hi there,

I picked up a MacBook Pro this evening that wasn't booting. After booting to the online recovery option, Disk Utility sees the disk but says that it is not formatted and the options to verify and repair were greyed out. I removed the drive, installed a spare drive of my own and installed Mountain Lion on my disk. The original hard drive has been connected to the Mac via USB.

I ran TestDisk which didn't seem to find anything. Next I installed EaseUS DataRecovery Wizard and it has found 450,532 (and counting) files. The file structure looks good, I can the various folders that I would expect to see on a Mac.

Here's the question...is there something like Startup Repair in Windows or a reliable utility that can force OSX realise that all the files are there and use them to boot the laptop?

Thanks in advance.

David

P.S. Just an aside. The hard drive that I installed had previously been in a Windows 7 laptop. I had forgotten that there was an OS on the disk. The MacBook started up and booted into Windows without any problems. Then it started downloading drivers for the new hardware. Have to say, I was surprised and impressed! Didn't have time to wait and see if it found all the drivers.

 

[lcoughey]

I don't see anyone were you mention getting a clone. From what I can tell, you haven't and you are messing with the original, risking permanent data loss.

 

[Markverhyden]

^^^ What Luke said is always the first step in this type of situation. Beyond that it sounds like you may not have much experience with Mac's. For many years Apple machines have been able to run Windoze natively. If the customer places a real monetary value on their data you should get some help.

What version of OS X?

If Easus found a folder/file structure that looks like OS X then the drive is not encrypted. AFTER you have made a full disk image you should work on the image. You can image it to another HD of the same size. If you can boot into the imaged drive via single user then you can run fsck. Another well known drive file system utility in the OS X world is Disk Warrior. I've had that fix serious file system problems but you may have something else going on.

Also what do you mean by

The original hard drive has been connected to the Mac via USB

Was this the boot drive? What is the make and model of the external drive?

 

[ohio_grad_06]

Yep. Should not be running test disk. Only thing you need to be doing first is getting a clone of the drive. Ddrescue from parted magic would probably do what you want. But doing disk testing to much and trying to recover from the original drive may finish the drive off. Some of us guys have learned the hard way.

 

[altrenda]

Back up the drive.
On my external drive, I have a bootable version of Mavericks. I have Disk Warrior on there as
well.

Boot from the external, run Disk Warrior and rebuild the file structure of the internal drive. That fixes this problem for me 90% of the time.
Tech Tool works as well.

 

[pcpete]

Back up the drive.
On my external drive, I have a bootable version of Mavericks. I have Disk Warrior on there as
well.

Boot from the external, run Disk Warrior and rebuild the file structure of the internal drive. That fixes this problem for me 90% of the time.
Tech Tool works as well.

do that on the clone of the internal drive

 

[ohio_grad_06]

Exactly. What I've learned from people here, when possible, get a full backup of the drive, clone it to a healthy drive, and work from that.

The more troubleshooting and testing/data recovery you do on your original drive, the higher chance you have of killing it.

 

[altrenda]

That would be the safest way.

Something I've wondered, do you do the same thing on a Windows drive that has an MBR failure, like Error Loading Operating System, Operating System not found, etc? Since these are the rough equivalents, maybe I will start doing it on those as well.

 

[pcpete]

That would be the safest way

Plus you will get better recovery results. You can keep running multiple passes with a program like ddresuce. The first pass you grab the easiest sectors, the second pass you grab the ones left behind. You can keep running passes (even backwards) trying to fill in the missed sectors. When all is said and done you will have a more complete image to recover from.

 

[altrenda]

This isn't a really a recovery issue. You are just rebuilding the directory, which can get corrupted. This is usually caused by the user turning of the power rather than going through the shut down, but can have other causes. It's kind of like a corrupted MBR. The data is still there. The system just can't boot.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

Tell you what though. Especially on windows, if you recover a failing drive to a good one and keep all the data intact the client should be very happy.

 

[lcoughey]

This isn't a really a recovery issue. You are just rebuilding the directory, which can get corrupted. This is usually caused by the user turning of the power rather than going through the shut down, but can have other causes. It's kind of like a corrupted MBR. The data is still there. The system just can't boot.

Maybe, but I get lots of work from clients after their technician make the same assumptions and make the situation a data recovery issue.

 

[WeFixIT.ie]

This was a chance to experiment on a Mac where the customer had already said that the data on the disk was not important and to find some useful tools for working on a Mac.

EaseUs showed all of the data but when I restored some jpegs they were either 0 or 1kb in size. DiskWarrior didn't sort things out either. It looked good initially but once DiskWarrior was finished the drive was reported as being a total size of about 40GB.

In the end, I wiped the disk and recreated the partition. Full size was available on the disk and all was well. Ran the laptop for a day with multiple reboots without any trouble. Returned the laptop and told the customer that although it's currently running fine, be careful about backing up in case the problems reoccurs.

Thanks all for your input.

 

[Markverhyden]

If the customer is using Time Machine to backup make sure they periodically test the backup by trying some file recoveries. Time Machine is famous for backing up a problematic drive with no error messages. Then when a restore is attempted it looks like it's there but is corrupted and irretrievable. Seen that a few times.