It's been ages since I've been on here but I'm at a loss of how to proceed outside of hiring a data recovery specialist company...
My Dad has an 4K Retina 2017 [18,2] model that was purchased online through the Apple Store. It's been a champ up until about a month ago when an OS update apparently trashed the internal 1TB hard drive overnight. It didn't seem to be due to any surge/spike or power outage. And of course, his external hard drive hadn't been configured for backup since it had been used with his older eMac that was retired.
So, I tried multiple startup options to restore the drive but they didn't work. I didn't want to erase the drive so I had him contact AppleCare and they booked a waste-of-time appointment with Mobile Kangaroo who wasted 2 days only to declare it was a software issue requiring the OS to be re-installed and data recovery to restore the contents for a good extra $200. We picked up the iMac and then my Dad called AppleCare again who then scheduled service at the local Apple Store. The Apple Store ran diagnostics and determined the drive wasn't defective but reloading the OS would wipe the drive. They asked him if he wanted to buy a blank hard drive so he could be free to retrieve the data himself and he said "yes". It appears the new internal drive is a Fusion Drive.
Anyway, now I'm back to trying to retrieve the data on the former internal drive which is now connected externally and connected via USB 3.x cable to the iMac [I didn't have a Thunderbolt x.x/USB C cable and the external hard drive enclosure is USB C-to-USB 3.x via its bundled cable].
I've done a lot of data recovery on the PC platform in the past and I must say, I really dislike the free and trial versions of the data recovery apps on the Mac side in comparison. Mainly because it's so infuriating in distinguishing which hard drive it's trying to scan. macOS does not do many favors in the OS displaying the same hard drive multiple times under different names [IMHO] and even with an external drive listing it as a SATA-based instead of via external USB connection is infuriating. I've used Disk Drill, Stellar DataRecovery, Data Rescue, and iBoySoft Data Recovery and they're all terrible, IMHO.
My interest is recovering each account from the now external drive so that the Migration Assistant can find them and then bring them over to the new internal drive. I don't want to individually recover each file in separate piles like pictures, videos, music, etc which is what most of these apps seem to do.
With Disk Drill, it's not even clear if it's actually scanning the external drive or the internal since it seems to only be able to recover about 19-20GB of data which seems to be Apple based pictures, documents, movies, and music from the OS distribution itself. And it also claims the EFI info is in a FAT32 partition.
I'm not even sure if the OS that was loaded previously was High Sierra, High Sierra attempting to upgrade to Mojave, or Mojave at the time. The Apple Store loaded Catalina on the replacement hard drive. It seems that the journal information on the now external drive was hosed with the automatic OS update.
With that mouthful having been said, does anyone have any suggestions on how to proceed outside of resorting to hiring a data recovery specialist? Thanks!
And on top of that all, my Dad's Apple account is in recovery mode because of miskeying in his account password when trying to log into it when setting up the new internal hard drive in his iMac. We know what the password is but we're not daring to try to log into iCloud to access his .mac/.me email since it might delay the automatic recovery process further [AppleCare recommended that approach and said in one instance, it took 27 days for the automated system to recover access to a user's account]. Sigh....
Edit: I should mention that my goal here is recovering the accounts, moving them onto the new internal drive, and then configuring the external drives as Time Machine back ups so this hopefully won't happen again to my Dad...
My Dad has an 4K Retina 2017 [18,2] model that was purchased online through the Apple Store. It's been a champ up until about a month ago when an OS update apparently trashed the internal 1TB hard drive overnight. It didn't seem to be due to any surge/spike or power outage. And of course, his external hard drive hadn't been configured for backup since it had been used with his older eMac that was retired.
So, I tried multiple startup options to restore the drive but they didn't work. I didn't want to erase the drive so I had him contact AppleCare and they booked a waste-of-time appointment with Mobile Kangaroo who wasted 2 days only to declare it was a software issue requiring the OS to be re-installed and data recovery to restore the contents for a good extra $200. We picked up the iMac and then my Dad called AppleCare again who then scheduled service at the local Apple Store. The Apple Store ran diagnostics and determined the drive wasn't defective but reloading the OS would wipe the drive. They asked him if he wanted to buy a blank hard drive so he could be free to retrieve the data himself and he said "yes". It appears the new internal drive is a Fusion Drive.
Anyway, now I'm back to trying to retrieve the data on the former internal drive which is now connected externally and connected via USB 3.x cable to the iMac [I didn't have a Thunderbolt x.x/USB C cable and the external hard drive enclosure is USB C-to-USB 3.x via its bundled cable].
I've done a lot of data recovery on the PC platform in the past and I must say, I really dislike the free and trial versions of the data recovery apps on the Mac side in comparison. Mainly because it's so infuriating in distinguishing which hard drive it's trying to scan. macOS does not do many favors in the OS displaying the same hard drive multiple times under different names [IMHO] and even with an external drive listing it as a SATA-based instead of via external USB connection is infuriating. I've used Disk Drill, Stellar DataRecovery, Data Rescue, and iBoySoft Data Recovery and they're all terrible, IMHO.
My interest is recovering each account from the now external drive so that the Migration Assistant can find them and then bring them over to the new internal drive. I don't want to individually recover each file in separate piles like pictures, videos, music, etc which is what most of these apps seem to do.
With Disk Drill, it's not even clear if it's actually scanning the external drive or the internal since it seems to only be able to recover about 19-20GB of data which seems to be Apple based pictures, documents, movies, and music from the OS distribution itself. And it also claims the EFI info is in a FAT32 partition.
I'm not even sure if the OS that was loaded previously was High Sierra, High Sierra attempting to upgrade to Mojave, or Mojave at the time. The Apple Store loaded Catalina on the replacement hard drive. It seems that the journal information on the now external drive was hosed with the automatic OS update.
With that mouthful having been said, does anyone have any suggestions on how to proceed outside of resorting to hiring a data recovery specialist? Thanks!
And on top of that all, my Dad's Apple account is in recovery mode because of miskeying in his account password when trying to log into it when setting up the new internal hard drive in his iMac. We know what the password is but we're not daring to try to log into iCloud to access his .mac/.me email since it might delay the automatic recovery process further [AppleCare recommended that approach and said in one instance, it took 27 days for the automated system to recover access to a user's account]. Sigh....
Edit: I should mention that my goal here is recovering the accounts, moving them onto the new internal drive, and then configuring the external drives as Time Machine back ups so this hopefully won't happen again to my Dad...
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