Anyone had any luck recovering data from a HDD where the SSD had failed? Terminal doesn't even show the Logical Volume of the HDD so that it can be forced to mount. Only the EFI partition mounts. I'd certainly never buy a Mac with Fusion Drive and keep them as one disk. Quite the headache if one fails.
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Fusion Drive HDD Data Recovery
- Thread starter asdavis10
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That is true of any drive failure, fusion or otherwise. Unfortunately, I have not heard of anyone successfully recovering data from a fusion drive where one of the drives has failed. The bits are scattered between the 2 drives. I am sorry for your trouble, but because of the risk of failure and data loss I have implemented a double backup process.
I have a mini with a fusion drive and I maintain 2 automatic backups using Time Machine (TM) and Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) in case there is a failure. The CCC drive is a bootable that allows me to be back up and running right away. The TM allows me to easily restore files if there is an issue with CCC. I have found, for me, that CCC has been more reliable than TM.
I backup twice too. But the person I'm trying to help didn't have a recent backup. Was just hoping someone found the silver bullet for data recovery from a Fusion Drive. I set them up with the drives separate going forward. But I removed the original HDD in hopes that recovery can happen at some point.
I've had luck once using a combination of DiskWarrior and Carbon Copy Cloner on an iMac where the HDD component of the Fusion drive was failing to recover most of the files. I assume how viable this method is depends on the severity of failure, but in this case Disk Utility was unable to mount the drive, where as DW was able to rebuild it and it functioned long enough to back up most of the files. (However, when I tried to use this method on an iMac where the SSD component of the Fusion drive had failed, it did not work and the failure was presumably more severe.)
OP wrote:
"the person I'm trying to help didn't have a recent backup."
That person is probably out of luck.
I don't think you're going to get anything from the failed drive.
I'm wondering if even a professional data recovery service could (and they cost LOTS of money).
Best thing for the person you're trying to help to do is:
- Get another drive installed
- Get an OS onto it
- Restore from the last backup (even though it's an old one)
- Backup more frequently in the future...
"the person I'm trying to help didn't have a recent backup."
That person is probably out of luck.
I don't think you're going to get anything from the failed drive.
I'm wondering if even a professional data recovery service could (and they cost LOTS of money).
Best thing for the person you're trying to help to do is:
- Get another drive installed
- Get an OS onto it
- Restore from the last backup (even though it's an old one)
- Backup more frequently in the future...
The failed drive was the SSD. The HDD is fine. But it was a Fusion Drive iMac and even though the HDD is fine, I can't get it to mount because the other part of the logical volume (the SSD) is missing. I'm going to refer them to DriveSavers and call it a day.
