Random (usually) Apple Related Tidbits
Recovering a severly damaged drive with Disk Warriror and Carbon Copy Cloner
I've had some baaaaaaaaad luck with hard drives lately. It just seems like when one bad thing happens drive-wise, another one is bound to follow. Nevertheless, when things go wrong, someone has to make them right again. And, if you're reading this, then that's likely where you come in...
I've had some baaaaaaaaad luck with hard drives lately. It just seems like when one bad thing happens drive-wise, another one is bound to follow. Nevertheless, when things go wrong, someone has to make them right again. And, if you're reading this, then that's likely where you come in...
The drive in question here is a little old 2.5" 160 GB Apple OEM SATA drive (can't even recall the manufacturer offhand). Without any warning, the MacBook in which it lived up and crashed and wouldn't start up again. Of course, as is nearly always the case with bad hard drives, this one wasn't backed up (bad, bad, I know). As such, some heroic measures were in order to resurrect this drive.
My initial fear was that the issue here was that a hardware issue was to blame. However, after pulling the drive out of the MacBook and using an external enclosure, I was initially encouraged by the fact that Disk Utility could see the disk (always a good thing). The actual volume "Macintosh HD" in this case, was not mounted. As expected, the first round of repairs--running "Repair Disk"--was unsuccessful (it did give me an ominous warning to get as many files off of the drive as quickly as possible though...thanks for the info).
Time to turn to the heavy duty artillery--Disk Warrior. For those that don't know, Disk Warrior really only does one thing--rebuild volume directories. Luckily it does that one thing well. However, as I found out, that can take some time. As I said earlier, lacking a backup, I really needed to salvage the data on this drive. So, when I ran Disk Warrior and it started taking some time, I simply let it do its thing. Despite looking like it was frozen at times and reporting that it's progress was being slowed down by hardware failure, I decided to "set it and forget it." After an overnight run, I came back to find that Disk Warrior had, indeed, made it all the way through its recovery routine. I tried the option to "Replace" the existing directory with the newly created directory but Disk Warrior failed. Luckily, it has another option--"Preview." What "Preview" does (as I soon learned) is to mount the disk using the newly created directory, thus allowing the copying of files from the damaged drive. What's even nicer is the fact that once it's mounted the drive, other tools can access that mounted drive just like a normal disk. With a usable disk, I was able to fire up the excellent Carbon Copy Cloner and clone the hard drive in its entirety.
All told, the entire process took nearly 24 hours of continuous processing for a 160 GB drive. On the downside, that's a long time; I can only imagine what it would have taken were that a 1.5 TB drive. On the upside, I have the data safe and sound. And, when it comes down to it, that's what counts.
The drive in question here is a little old 2.5" 160 GB Apple OEM SATA drive (can't even recall the manufacturer offhand). Without any warning, the MacBook in which it lived up and crashed and wouldn't start up again. Of course, as is nearly always the case with bad hard drives, this one wasn't backed up (bad, bad, I know). As such, some heroic measures were in order to resurrect this drive.
My initial fear was that the issue here was that a hardware issue was to blame. However, after pulling the drive out of the MacBook and using an external enclosure, I was initially encouraged by the fact that Disk Utility could see the disk (always a good thing). The actual volume "Macintosh HD" in this case, was not mounted. As expected, the first round of repairs--running "Repair Disk"--was unsuccessful (it did give me an ominous warning to get as many files off of the drive as quickly as possible though...thanks for the info).
Time to turn to the heavy duty artillery--Disk Warrior. For those that don't know, Disk Warrior really only does one thing--rebuild volume directories. Luckily it does that one thing well. However, as I found out, that can take some time. As I said earlier, lacking a backup, I really needed to salvage the data on this drive. So, when I ran Disk Warrior and it started taking some time, I simply let it do its thing. Despite looking like it was frozen at times and reporting that it's progress was being slowed down by hardware failure, I decided to "set it and forget it." After an overnight run, I came back to find that Disk Warrior had, indeed, made it all the way through its recovery routine. I tried the option to "Replace" the existing directory with the newly created directory but Disk Warrior failed. Luckily, it has another option--"Preview." What "Preview" does (as I soon learned) is to mount the disk using the newly created directory, thus allowing the copying of files from the damaged drive. What's even nicer is the fact that once it's mounted the drive, other tools can access that mounted drive just like a normal disk. With a usable disk, I was able to fire up the excellent Carbon Copy Cloner and clone the hard drive in its entirety.
All told, the entire process took nearly 24 hours of continuous processing for a 160 GB drive. On the downside, that's a long time; I can only imagine what it would have taken were that a 1.5 TB drive. On the upside, I have the data safe and sound. And, when it comes down to it, that's what counts.
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