I [del]have[/del] had an iMac which, since last night, is no longer booting. The chime sounds, the fan comes on, and then I hear the disc clinking and spinning and clinking . . .
Does that sound like a hard drive failure?
If so, will a ‘professional’ be able to retrieve my files without having to use methods usually reserved for the NSA, i.e. using a relatively simple (and inexpensive) process?
Thanks!
A SATA drive of mine was knocked and now doesn’t start, after looking into all the things I could do — and it’s prolly not a good idea to freeze it nor to tap it with a hammer as did our ancestors old wives’ tales — I decided the best thing was to wait until I can afford to send it off to a firm ( up north in my country, like Cheshire ) who would either retrieve the files or not charge if this was impossible. Any size/type of drive for a fixed price of £120, plus postage probably ( and maybe also a new drive to put the files on ). There must be outfits with similar no fix no charge fees in your country.
Just don’t try anything at home. You could get lucky: but with mechanical damage already there, you could ruin it more.
When I worked in television, I was on a shoot where the cameras recorded live to big hard drives.
During the shoot the power went out and the drives got erased. I was told by the tech that if the drives were to just simply quit working it would be a pretty simple process to retrieve them.
I guess where I am going is that provided your drive didn’t die catastrophically, like from a power outage while you were saving, or didn’t get dropped and actually break the disc. Theoretically it is all there and some software should be able to retrieve it.
Usually when my friends’ drives die I am able to put the drive in a external case and grab the files off using TestDisk.
I don’t know how much a professional would charge for this tho.
I successfully recovered files from a failed drive (one that was clicking, by the way) by freezing it. Of course, once it warmed up, I was no longer able to read from it. So I refroze it multiple times until I read all of the files I wanted from it. Another problem; the drive case accumulated a lot of condensation as the very cold drive sat outside the computer while I read it. So I wouldn’t recommend putting the frozen drive in your computer, because the condensation might cause a short circuit.
What worked for me may not work for the OP. But it’s not just an old wives’ tale.
Ah, so there’s still hope! Many thanks.
Your question suggests that you don’t have backups of these files.
If this is true, and if you do manage to retrieve your files, then for Og’s sake get yourself an external drive and keep backups of all your files. With hard drive space so cheap now, there’s no excuse not to back up your files. Some cloud storage is also a good idea.
Computer shop owner:
Hope, yes, a small one. Some of these failures are electronic and swapping the circuit board with one from an IDENTICAL working drive can work as well.
Because its a Mac, you are also going to have fewer places intimately familiar with the nuts and bolts of Mac file systems, therefore less likely to find a place that can succeed at it for cheap.
IF there is data of meaningful value (business accounting, paid work in progress, things like that) dinking around on your own or having your friendly neighborhood computer guy give it a shot are rarely successful. With valuable data, go straight to a forensic data recovery place like drivesavers
I have not seen them fail one of my customers yet.
I am lazy, yes, and pretty ignorant about most things involving the computer. Still, I made the effort and knew enough to make sure that all my key files were backed-up and/or stored on our ‘corporate’ server.
Mostly it’s music that I (may have) lost - a real pain in the ass to recapture.
ETA: And, I will be getting an external drive. You bet I will.
I just went down this road recently. Can’t help, but I can sympathize.
If you are like me, all your cars are next.
I recommend more than one external drive. I use three for backups and one is stored away from home. (There should be some good prices on them during the Black Friday sales.)
Hard drive data recovery, in ascending order of severity/difficulty/expense:
[ul]
[li]If the computer motherboard is dead, you can often just insert the drive into another computer (or an adaptor to treat it as an external drive) and retrieve the files[/li]
[li]If the circuitry on the outside of the drive itself is dead, you can replace the board with another from an identical hard drive (needs to be the same make, model, size and firmware version - but this often easily possible if you bought more than one of the same computer at the same time). I’ve done this successfully myself - it’s scary, but not beyond home/amateur-level skills.[/li]…From here on, it’s professionals only…
[li]If something electronic/mechanical inside the drive is dead, the drive platters can be removed in a clean-room environment and installed in place of the platters in an identical hard drive. [/li]
[li]If none of the above works, the raw data on the platters may still be readable by specialist equipment, but assembling all those 1s and 0s back into anything like usable files is likely to be hugely expensive[/li][/ul]
Caveats:
All of the above assume that the failure itself didn’t actually destroy the data. (e.g. if the drive heads scratched the magnetic coating off the platters, all is pretty much lost)
Whole Disk Encryption (if present) adds a difficulty factor to the above list.