Mac Hard Drive Recovery

[EXCellR8]

I have a friend's Macbook Pro with a 160GB Fujitsu hard drive that doesn't want to cooperate. The OS never loads but the hard drive doesn't seem to be dead, at least not yet. When I used Disk Utility to scan and verify the drive, it appeared to be making progress right up until the error: live file recovery is not supported or something along those lines. It just became unresponsive after that and all I could do was move the busy cursor around...

I don't really need OSX to boot, but I would like the files which, according to Disk Utility, are still intact from what information it displayed before verifying the drive. The computer is in rough shape and will be replaced, but it would be nice to retrieve what I can from it. What's the best approach? I don't really have much Mac software lying around since I don't service them very often, but I can order something if it's reasonably priced.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[Tyranicus]

You can connect the drive to a PC and use a program like HFS Explorer or MacDrive to view and copy the files off it.

 

[EXCellR8]

I will probably end up doing that because I left DU running overnight and it finished with a pretty generic error--stating that the disk could not be repaired.

I will post back if I run into any additional issues, but it appears that the data is still in tact.

 

[Elixer]

You should ALWAYS clone the drive in question to a new drive (usually using ddrescue), and then do the recovery on the cloned drive.

Reason is, the more you use the faulty drive, the more damaged it may become.

 

[EXCellR8]

Yes, but I tried cloning prior to recovery and there were so many bad sectors that it just halted on error after error... so I figured that was just too much stress on the drive.

Instead of using a PC I just connected it to one of my Linux boxes so I could at least see the files/folders. There were certainly some errors on copying, but I think I recovered 90% of all his stuff so that's great!

 

[Elixer]

Yeah, but ddrescue is made for recovery from bad sectors (and other things), or in other words, it won't error out (unless you want it to), but it will continue to try the bad sector X times, if nothing, it moves on.

 

[EXCellR8]

alright i'll have to keep that in mind, thanks.