An epic tale of two smartphones and three early Intel Macs. (It's image heavy so don't say you wasn't warned!)
After recharging and powering up my iPhone 6, I was met with the dreaded sight of the Apple logo flashing on and off and then the Black Screen of Death. None of the troubleshooting measures that I found worked and the only remaining option was to restore the unit to its factory settings via a Mac.
I chose to do this using my 2010 11" C2D MBA under Catalina.
Everything appeared to be going according to plan but at the very end I received this error message:
The iPhone could not be restored. An unknown error has occurred (9)
So, I switched to Mojave...
Still no joy.
Something told me that I should try a different Mac, so I switched machines and restarted the procedure on my 2011 13" MBP using High Sierra.
Success!
What I don't understand is why did it work using the MBP and High Sierra but not the MBA?
Part II: the microSD card in my Android phone suffered a corruption, causing the disappearance of 12 months of images and the generation of error messages that other images couldn't be accessed. When I checked the file manager it reported that the card had gone from 10% remaining storage space to 44%. Uh oh. Courtesy of a microSD card adapter, I examined it in Finder and the remaining space was also misreported but going on past experience, I suspected (hoped) that the data was still present underneath the corruption.
First, I cloned the card's contents using CCC on my 2006 MacBook Pro as a precautionary measure, so that no matter what transpired later, I'd at least have
some of the data in case the card died on me.
With some semblance of peace of mind secured, I ran
Photorec - which has saved me from data loss disasters so many times that I sent the programmer a much deserved donation.
It recovered
everything - including the 12 months of photos and videos which had seemingly vanished!
Could the corruption be corrected so that I could resume using the microSD card as it was prior to whatever caused the issue? I thought it was worth a try with
Testdisk but it wouldn't recognise that I'd unmounted the SD card in Disk Utility so I booted Knoppix (which contains Testdisk) from a live-CD instead.
I proceeded and in two minutes, it crashed.
Of course, I wasn't going to give up that easily and I ran Testdisk again from Snow Leopard in the hope that a reboot would clear away whatever had caused the read-only confusion earlier. What a difference a reboot makes...
...it had taken several days to reach this stage of analysis and then, in a moment of clumsiness, I ended up pulling out the MagSafe connector from a machine that doesn't have a working battery.
After that, I transferred the task to my 2010 MBA and its drastically superior CPU - coupled with an up to date release of the software, made short work of the drive analysis: what had taken days on the older machine was accomplished in
hours.
The outcome?
The partition couldn't be restored to working order, it would appear. Ah well, hardly the end of the world and I was able to recover the data - which was my sole goal - this would've been a little bonus for the episode. I can just reformat the card and continue using it, unless it's faulty? I ask this because I came across a warning that corrupted SD cards should no longer be treated as reliable. How accurate is this claim?
One important lesson which has been reiterated to me by this experience is the need to back up data - and to carry it out regularly because if I'd done so, I wouldn't have found myself in this situation. Copying images and videos from an Android phone to a Mac via USB is cumbersome - the Android File Transfer program is severely limited, even in the most basic of functionality. There is commercial software that fills this gap but it's annoying having to pay for a feature that's present with other types of smartphones.
I guess the easiest, cheapest and fastest method is to remove the microSD card periodically, connect it to the Mac and copy the data over.
