MacBook Pro 6,1 - HD failure/command line question

[wheresmybacon]

My wife's Macbook Pro died. I have a question for the Mac Gurus, but first a quick rundown of what I've done. Briefly: I'm a sysadmin by trade, I just want to make sure I'm not missing something before I throw in the towel with this data recovery operation. She has a ton of irreplaceable photos on this drive, and of course she's not been doing backups.

What I've done:

Pressed Apple-S on boot, ran fsck -fy. Failed. Returns "disk0s2: I/O error".
Booted with Snow Leopard install DVD, ran Disk Utility repair. Failed. Tells me to backup my data and reformat.
Pulled the drive and, with a SATA to USB adapter, attached it to my Win 7 box which has MacDrive. Initially it sees the drive and that it's an HFS file system, but then when I try to access the drive, both explorer.exe and MacDrive lock and must be manually killed. I've also tried HFS Explorer with the same result.

The one ray of hope is I can see the folder structure from the command line. I can navigate it up and down and I can see everything in there. Now I just need to get it. My question:

TLDR version:

Is there a way to mount an external USB drive from the Apple-S command prompt? I just want to mount the drive and copy off whatever's still accessible.

 

[TheStu]

IF you have a spare SATA drive, you could install OS X to the spare drive, and then hook up the bad drive externally.

I am not aware of a way to mount the drive in the command prompt that you are talking about, but I don't mess around with it much.

 

[wheresmybacon]

IF you have a spare SATA drive, you could install OS X to the spare drive, and then hook up the bad drive externally.

I am not aware of a way to mount the drive in the command prompt that you are talking about, but I don't mess around with it much.

I tried plugging my SATA-USB external adapter with the bad drive in it into an old MacBook 1,1 but the OS didn't even see the drive. This one runs OSX 10.4, so I'm not sure if that's the problem or not.

I don't have an extra SATA lappy drive right now unfortunately.

 

[TheStu]

I tried plugging my SATA-USB external adapter with the bad drive in it into an old MacBook 1,1 but the OS didn't even see the drive. This one runs OSX 10.4, so I'm not sure if that's the problem or not.

I don't have an extra SATA lappy drive right now unfortunately.

No, it shouldn't be an issue, it should have at least seen it. I am going to go ahead and assume that you have tried googling this question.

Also, when you hooked up the drive on the old MacBook, did it show up in Disk Utility? If yes, try repairing the disk from there. It might get it working just enough.

 

[JSt0rm]

If the file system is just bad you could try one of the free file recovery softwares on the market. I used one before to recover a movie project for a film house.

I forget the name of the software I used though.

As long as the problem is corrupted files structure and not a mechanical problem you should be fine to recover with some software. You could even break the format of the disk and still recover the data.

 

[JSt0rm]

http://www.micromat.com/ <-- we have also had luck with this software. It has a option to scour the disk for data. It will take a couple of days!

As I said you may need to reformat the disk to allow it to be mounted in some way and then scour the disk for data.

The above should be taken as conjecture and speculation on my part, if the data is truly valuable you should take the disk to a professional.

 

[wheresmybacon]

No, it shouldn't be an issue, it should have at least seen it. I am going to go ahead and assume that you have tried googling this question.

Also, when you hooked up the drive on the old MacBook, did it show up in Disk Utility? If yes, try repairing the disk from there. It might get it working just enough.

I haven't Googled the failure of the 1,1 MacBook to see the drive. I'll give that a shot. It was one of the last things I tried before I went to bed last night.

 

[wheresmybacon]

http://www.micromat.com/ <-- we have also had luck with this software. It has a option to scour the disk for data. It will take a couple of days!

As I said you may need to reformat the disk to allow it to be mounted in some way and then scour the disk for data.

The above should be taken as conjecture and speculation on my part, if the data is truly valuable you should take the disk to a professional.

Good info.

We may end up taking it to a pro. I'll let you guys know how it turns out. Thanks for the ideas.

 

[JSt0rm]

Good info.

We may end up taking it to a pro. I'll let you guys know how it turns out. Thanks for the ideas.

When I say reformat make sure its the quick one! This will leave all your precious 1's and 0's where they were.

 

[kamikazekyle]

You can try Photorec/TestDisk. They have native binaries for all OSes. If the drive at least registers when plugged into Windows, PhotoRec should be able to read the HFS partition and try a recovery.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Alternatively, you can grab a live Linux distro that'll boot on the affected Macbook and slap in Photorec from a repository (or from the above download) and try it from there.

PhotoRec is basically a specialzed version of TestDisk. TestDisk can do a whoooole lot more, but isn't as quite as straightforward. Though I've never actually done data recovery on a HFS formatted drive, I have used the above tools on a Windows machine as part of the UBCD to recover lost data.

OH! Also, try sticking the hard drive in the freezer overnight. Sometimes that gets it spinning long enough to recover data, though it depends if the failure is with the electronics, mechanical, or the file system as to if it'll be successful or not. Worth a shot at least.

 

[wheresmybacon]

You can try Photorec/TestDisk. They have native binaries for all OSes. If the drive at least registers when plugged into Windows, PhotoRec should be able to read the HFS partition and try a recovery.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Alternatively, you can grab a live Linux distro that'll boot on the affected Macbook and slap in Photorec from a repository (or from the above download) and try it from there.

PhotoRec is basically a specialzed version of TestDisk. TestDisk can do a whoooole lot more, but isn't as quite as straightforward. Though I've never actually done data recovery on a HFS formatted drive, I have used the above tools on a Windows machine as part of the UBCD to recover lost data.

OH! Also, try sticking the hard drive in the freezer overnight. Sometimes that gets it spinning long enough to recover data, though it depends if the failure is with the electronics, mechanical, or the file system as to if it'll be successful or not. Worth a shot at least.

Ohhh I'm going to give that a try. It's free, which is better than my current endeavor:

I downloaded Stellar Phoenix Mac Recovery on Windows (http://www.stellarinfo.com/mac-data-recovery-on-windows.htm), and it's running right now. It sees the HFS partition, and while the Quick Recovery option crashes, there's another slow sector by sector option that seems like it's working.

It's a trial version that I've got, and it looks like it only gives you a preview of what's recoverable. Full version license is $115. Ouch.

Thanks a ton for this link. I'll give it a shot when I get home again tonight.

 

[wheresmybacon]

Oh I also forgot to mention that I downloaded an Ubuntu live ISO, burned it, booted with it, and fdisk -l only sees the EFI partition. Can't mount the HFS one because it thinks it's empty.

 

[kamikazekyle]

You might not need to actually mount the file system, especially if using Linux. A sector-by-sector pull from the device should recover the bits that are there regardless of what the file system says. Though if the file system is pretty much unreadable, then you probably are talking sector-level recovery and manually piecing together the data. Now as to if the sectors are readable or not would depend on if there's any actual hardware damage. Once you start talking hardware damage, it becomes a *lot* more difficult to retrieve the data. At that point, most data recovery operations will probably start charging a few grand minimum. You can also try some of these softwares here: http://alternativeto.net/software/recuva/?platform=mac http://alternativeto.net/software/recuva/?platform=windows Alternatives to the popular Recuva for Windows on OS X (first link), and Windows (second).

 

[dawks]

Run SpinRite on the drive. Often drive failures are the result of bad sectors. SpinRite bangs on the drive and tries to recover as much data from a bad sector as possible, then tells the drive to check the sector out, and bring a new one online. SpinRite is filesystem agnostic. It only cares about the physical sectors so it works with any filesystem (even iPod or DVR drives). It wont run on a Mac because it still uses BIOS, not EFI, so you'll need to scan the drive in Windows.

You'd be surprised at how many problems are caused just by bad sectors and how well SpinRite actually works. As long as your drive still spins, and the heads still work, this could be the perfect tool.

 

[wheresmybacon]

You can try Photorec/TestDisk. They have native binaries for all OSes. If the drive at least registers when plugged into Windows, PhotoRec should be able to read the HFS partition and try a recovery.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Alternatively, you can grab a live Linux distro that'll boot on the affected Macbook and slap in Photorec from a repository (or from the above download) and try it from there.

PhotoRec is basically a specialzed version of TestDisk. TestDisk can do a whoooole lot more, but isn't as quite as straightforward. Though I've never actually done data recovery on a HFS formatted drive, I have used the above tools on a Windows machine as part of the UBCD to recover lost data.

OH! Also, try sticking the hard drive in the freezer overnight. Sometimes that gets it spinning long enough to recover data, though it depends if the failure is with the electronics, mechanical, or the file system as to if it'll be successful or not. Worth a shot at least.

kamikazekyle, you are a gentleman and a scholar. Photorec is awesome. It's still running, and it will continue to run overnight, but it's already recovered nearly 10,000 JPG's I feared were gone.

The one remaining thing I'm concerned with is restoring her Aperture library. But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it... At this point I'm just thankful I've been able to salvage at least some of the important stuff.

Thank you, sir!!!!

 

[wheresmybacon]

Run SpinRite on the drive. Often drive failures are the result of bad sectors. SpinRite bangs on the drive and tries to recover as much data from a bad sector as possible, then tells the drive to check the sector out, and bring a new one online. SpinRite is filesystem agnostic. It only cares about the physical sectors so it works with any filesystem (even iPod or DVR drives). It wont run on a Mac because it still uses BIOS, not EFI, so you'll need to scan the drive in Windows.

You'd be surprised at how many problems are caused just by bad sectors and how well SpinRite actually works. As long as your drive still spins, and the heads still work, this could be the perfect tool.

I'll give this a shot after Photorec is done running. It doesn't seem to be a phycial failure, so this very well may do the trick. Good suggestion.

 

[kamikazekyle]

Glad I could help with the suggestions. One thing on data recovery -- given the number of things that can cause an inaccessability to said data -- you might have to go through several tools, setups, and troubleshooting procedures to find one that works. This is especially true when the symptoms of the problem could be one of several causes.

Assuming the recovered JPEGs are coming through uncorrupted, it sounds like a simple partition or file system error rather than a mechanical failure or bad sectors. 'course, if the resulting recovered JPEGs are corrupted, then that's a good indicator of physical failure on the drive. In that case, you can get some more tools to try to recover the corrupted JPEGs, though at best they just fix the header information so the file can be read. If the actual content is lost, there's not much you can do about it.

I've heard great things about SpinRite, but since it's a paid-for solution and I haven't purchased it yet, I work through the free stuff first. So far I haven't had a need for it, though I've been tempted to buy it a few times so I can routinely test my hard-drive based backups. I've since migrated mostly to LTO-3 at home given the archival and high volume nature of my personal backups, and SpinRite unfortunately doesn't help there.