A question for a Mac guru
Posted by: Deane F on 10 December 2006
My mother and her husband just corrupted their oldish iMac HDD. (It's one of the old iMacs with the half-sphere base and chromed stalk holding the LCD monitor). Apparently they ran Nortons on it - not realising that to do so on an OS beyond version 10.3 is fatal - apparently Norton (defrag I believe) wipes or corrupts the directory - well, that's what the shop techs told them. They took the opportunity to upgrade the HDD to an 80GB unit and now they have a spare HDD with all of their files on it - but in an unreadable condition.
They had not made backups (sigh - but then I had to learn the hard way myself, twice...)
Is there any way they can get to the information on the drive?
Posted on: 10 December 2006 by joe90
Present offending item at service centre with lots of money.
Pray.
Posted on: 10 December 2006 by Deane F
The service centre said they could send it to the US, along with about $2000, and the data could be retrieved. Which is either good advice that's right on the mark; or simply means that the technicians at the service centre didn't know how to do it and the $2000 idea is "proof" that it's beyond them.
Which is why I posted here in the hope that somebody would say, "Oh, you just...."
Posted on: 10 December 2006 by Steve Hall
A UNIX filesystem is not like a Windows one. If a file is deleted, the chance of getting it back, in one piece is a remote one.
However, you might want to try this piece of shareware, I've not tried it, but apparenlty it can undelete files from a corrupted HFS+ filesystem.
http://www.ufsexplorer.com/features.php#drGood luck.
Pssst. Take backups, we all do dont we ?
Posted on: 10 December 2006 by Skip
I did the same thing on the same computer. It is a good excuse to get a new unit. I did it with disk warrior and it fries something to keep the unit from starting at all. I would call apple care and see what they recommend but I doubt there is much you can do.
Posted on: 10 December 2006 by garyi
There is no need to 'defrag' a mac harddrive.
Norton is the work of the devil.
You can buy a hardrive USB inclosure to put the knackered harddrive in, this will allow you to at least get it to a state where some software might look at it.
Posted on: 10 December 2006 by garyi
If you lok at this search link, you find loads of recovery software.
http://www.macupdate.com/search.php?keywords=recover&os...utton.x=0&button.y=0I should suggest that if for instance you mostly want to recover JPGs then use software designed for finding lost pictures.
I cannot vouch for any of these working. I lost a couple of drives so have to further external drives for precious data.
Skip it is unlikley disk worrior could fry internal componants. It could be a couple of things. Stick the OSX disk in whilst holding down C the re load the software.
If by fried you mean it will not turn on the take the base off, this is connected really complicatedly to the topper part of the base, behind that is a small battery, pull it out. Wait five seconds and put it back in. There is a metal bar that connects top to bottom for heat dissipation this needs a bit of heat compound put on it before putting back together.
Try turning it on now.
Posted on: 11 December 2006 by Paul Hutchings
It depends if you mean the physical hard drive is corrupted, or just that the old iMac no longer boots but the documents on it are likely to be intact.
As Gary said you could try sticking it in a Firewire/USB enclosure and plug it in, but my advice if the information is vitally important i.e. worth paying to recover, would be to send it to the likes of Vogon or a specialist data recovery company.
I've only every dealt with them for Windows drives and they charge about £100 to diagnose a drive and then give you a price if you want the data that they feel can be retrieved.
Granted they might get lucky, but generally the more they mess about with it after spotting the problem, the worse they are making it.
