Help, my Mac drive failed...

[Lias]

Running OSX. Tried it as a slave with my old Tower G3, but it won't even start up or show? It's now making a clicking noise, when I pullet it to bits, I noticed one of the reading arms is bent.

Had Techniq in Hams look at it, they caouldn't receover anything, suggested one of these specialists who want too much, so was hopng some clever clogs could help?

Don't mind paying a little cash, just not worth the thousands the other guys want.

If you pulled it to bits enough to see that arm, your pretty fucked.. The tolerances between the head and the platter are absolutely microscopic and introducing any dust of foreign particles into it is generally disasterous. PS: if the drive isnt detecting at all, professional data recovery is pretty much your only choice..

The only "cheap" data recovery place was Peacock Technologies, and I believe they have shut up shop now as the website is gone and when i last spoke to Alan he was very sick with prostate cancer. Even his budget service was still $500ish (he did on the backburner, recoveries took a few months, he worked on them when he didnt have full-rate paying work)

[RantyDave]

Not that it will help you now, but the combination of SuperDuper! (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDup...scription.html) and a firewire drive is absolutely killer for backing up macs. The resulting images are mountable and you can even boot off them.

Dave

[Skunk]

Carbon Copy Cloner does that too. Last time I checked it was free (complete with Scheduling etc...)

SuperDuper looks more Mac-like though and does the basics free. I might take it for a run...

[Drunken Monkey]

Yeah, Lias has it right, once you've opened it and looked inside the ONLY option is a data forensics specialist. That's pretty stuffed your chances of trying to get data off it cheaply.

What we would normally do is load the hard drive up on a linux box and run a tool that can image the drive sector by sector and not crash on bad blocks. The bad blocks will just get written as 0's. This image can then be mounted in another program and data that is intact recovered from there.

At the other end of the scale, data forensics experts can do all sorts off stuff like rebuild data of physically damaged plates bit by bit by measuring the magnetic residue, even if it's been damaged by fire/water/etc... It's an expensive and time consuming process though.

[Lias]

Yeah, Lias has it right, once you've opened it and looked inside the ONLY option is a data forensics specialist. That's pretty stuffed your chances of trying to get data off it cheaply.

That being said I've heard of people window modding their HDD's after opening them up but damned if I've ever been that keen lol.

[xwhatsit]

What we would normally do is load the hard drive up on a linux box and run a tool that can image the drive sector by sector and not crash on bad blocks. The bad blocks will just get written as 0's. This image can then be mounted in another program and data that is intact recovered from there.

Are you talking about dd(1)? If so, dd is available on Mac OS X boxes, it has all those basic Unix tools. I used dd on girlfriend's Macbook to image her stuffed memory card then zero it out just recently.