External hard drive recovery

[iKnowMr.Jobs]

So upon plugging in my external hard drive with my Time Machine Backup and a bunch of other files, it wasn't mounting to the Finder at all. So after running it through a bunch of things in Disk Utility, I finally did get it to mount to the Finder and I can only see the base of the hard drive and no further content in folder and it can't transfer it either. Disk Utility at this point, is just running me through circles with tests for the drive. Anything else I can do to recover the data? Also, do you think that anyone at the Genius Bar could help with this since I will be stopping my the Apple Store in the next few days to buy a new hard drive.

 

[Fishrrman]

Do you by chance have a second Mac you could try the drive on?

Something you might try (no promise of success):
- Power the Mac all the way off.
- Disconnect problem drive
- Restart Mac, get to finder
- RE-connect the drive (does it mount on desktop?)
- If it doesn't mount, WAIT a while (say, 5 minutes). Sometimes the finder will try to repair a drive that has difficulty mounting.
- Anything happen?

 

[iKnowMr.Jobs]

Do you by chance have a second Mac you could try the drive on?

Something you might try (no promise of success):
- Power the Mac all the way off.
- Disconnect problem drive
- Restart Mac, get to finder
- RE-connect the drive (does it mount on desktop?)
- If it doesn't mount, WAIT a while (say, 5 minutes). Sometimes the finder will try to repair a drive that has difficulty mounting.
- Anything happen?

I don't have a second mac personally, but i probably can borrow someone's who lives in my dorm for 10-15 minutes. I tried everything else though. The only thing that I got working on it since putting the drive through Disk Utility is mounting to the finder and desktop. It takes forever to load into the finder and when i try to open a folder in it, it brings the finder to a screeching halt. Beach ball and everything. I've rebooted, reset my PRAM, SMC, everything.

 

[grahamperrin]

ddrescue first

If the disk is failing, then do as little as possible with it. The more it spins, and so on, the greater the risk of worsening failure.

ddrescue will be an ideal first step, if you're happy to use a Terminal window for some of the recovery.

 

[iKnowMr.Jobs]

If the disk is failing, then do as little as possible with it. The more it spins, and so on, the greater the risk of worsening failure.

ddrescue will be an ideal first step, if you're happy to use a Terminal window for some of the recovery.

I don't have much experience in Terminal but I'm certainly not freaked out with a Command-line interface. Problem is, I can't find much information on how to install/use it. Is this accurate information? Can I trust ddrescue?

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/using-ddrescue-on-a-failing-hard-drive/

 

[grahamperrin]

… Can I trust ddrescue? …

I think so.

If you have a spare computer (not necessarily a Mac) you may find it most convenient to use ddrescue in Parted Magic on UBCD. https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=20556699#post20556699 for reference.

If you choose to run ddrescue on OS X, see for example http://pastebin.com/NrGE94i4 and note the difference between lines 3 and 18; you'll get much better performance from
/dev/rdisk… than from
/dev/disk…