Bad hard drive. Recovery options. OS X.

My wife’s laptop drive bit the dust. We already have back-ups of the absolute must-have files. I’ve tried Disk Warrior, Tech Tool Pro, Disk Utility, and the drive is toast. I can still navigate the directories, and pull random files off. But some will throw up an error that they can’t be copied.

All I want to do is copy over as much of her user folder as possible, just in case we missed something. The problem with just transferring over her user folder in one go is that it will transfer a couple hundred files, encounter a bad area of the drive, and then error out and stop.

In other words, let’s say I have folders named “A” through “Z” enclosed in a folder called “User.” I drag “User” over to my own hard drive, and it begins copying. “A” transfers over. “B” transfers over. And then it chokes on “C”, gives me an error, and quits the copy process. But “D” and “E” transfer over fine, so I basically have to restart the process, figuring out which files and folders are stuttering, and continue manually copying at a granular level.

Does that make any sense?

So, what I’m looking for is a utility that, when it gets to “C”, says, “ok, can’t copy a file in this folder. Let’s log it and move on to the next file and try that” and so on, instead of simply stopping the copying process every time.

I also tried just using Image in Disk Utility to make a disk image but that, predictably, didn’t work.

Any ideas other than manually figuring out what the readable folders and files are?

I use CopyCatX.
It’s not free, but it works.

I think Microsoft’s Robocopy (Robust File Copy) can probably do what you want:

Sample syntax:

However, if you want to recover as many as files as possible, I would buy a copy of SpinRite. It has saved my bacon on numerous occasions. I actually have a copy on a thumb drive with me at all times.

Sorry, didn’t read the OS X part. :smack: Forget Robocopy.

However, SpinRite will probably be able to repair the drive for you. It is operating system agnostic and boots off of a DOS clone.

Carbon Copy Cloner works pretty good for what you want. Free to use for the first 30 days, too.

http://www.bombich.com/download.html

Thanks. I’ll check the recommendations out this weekend!

I bet it’s not operating system agnostic enough to make a Mac boot a DOS disk.

The web site claims it can repair a Mac disk, but you’ve got to physically move it to a PC first. And frankly, that web site screams “scam” at me. I’d try this only after everything else failed.

One thing to try is letting the laptop cool completely. Then try some problem files that won’t copy and see if they copy when the laptop has just booted from the cool state.

Some techs even remove the drive, put it in an antistatic bag and pop it into the freezer for a while. (Google this before you try it to get some parameters.)

Since you’re going to have to replace the drive anyway, I’d get one in an external case and install that drive internally and install the existing problem drive in the case. That opens up a couple more options for recovery.

Sorry, should have been specific. I do have an external enclosure for the drive, and I have the problem drive connected to a desktop computer via USB. I don’t have much hope for recovering or fixing the drive, given that Disk Warrior and Tech Tools Pro 6 can’t do anything with it. Disk Warrior just tells me it’s unrecoverable, and Tech Tools Pro 6 just freezes after counting up to 2,000,000 files (out of 600 million) or something, and I have to Force Quit it. So, I’m not too optimistic at getting it up and running again, and it’s not that important that it works.

So, we just want to copy files over, in case we forgot anything. I’ll check out that Carbon Copy cloner.

As for the drive problems, we just ended up buying a new computer (it’s been about 5 years, anyway, and the laptop was banged up to heck), but can something other than the hard drive cause corruption? When the drive failed and fsck didn’t work, and the disk utilities all screamed hard drive failure at me, I went to a retired laptop and took out the hard drive to put in the laptop with the bad drive. It booted up fine, but after a couple hours, THAT drive was showing corruption problems and failing Verify Disk. Is this just coincidence? The computer will boot off a bootable external hard drive, and seems to run okay that way.

OK, cool, I’ve got CC Cloner running in the background, and it appears to be doing exactly what I wanted. After getting what I can off, I’ll see if the freezer trick can do anything and if I can actually get a real clone of it.

Heat is a common problem. If the fan has failed the internal drive can get too hot.

I can assure you it is not a scam. I recovered many hard drives with Spin Rite including recently my dad’s Windows ME (!) computer.

The best recovery tool is http://hddregenerator.org/

Not free but it does what it says on the box.

Download the program to CD then boot from the CD and let it run. Can take several hours depending on the size of you drive.

Has worked for me on a couple of occasions.