Something really terrible happened with my Mac yesterday evening. Its 80 GB Toshiba hard disk failed. First the computer refused to wake up from sleep. Then after a few restarts it started making HORRIBLE sqeaking noises and it totally stopped working.
I have only limited back ups (mail and photos and some work). But it seems I might have lost very precious data accumulated over 10 years. Music, documentes, presentations. You name it.
My Mac repair friend has tried several of his utilities but until tonight the news was bad bad bad. The drive is not even being seen by the utilities.
I am very depressed.
It’s totally my fault as I am very bad when it comes to back ups. The damn OSs of today should FORCE you to back up.
I am also angry as I just read very similar reports of Toshiba drives failing exactly like mine here.
If my Mac repairman utils don;t do the trick I am considering shipping the drive to the US to one of those disaster recovery companies (which will cost me a lot). I will do some research tonight on this. Any helpful info would be welcome.
Comments
14 responses to “My hard disk disaster!”
Here is the solution
It happened with me last month, with 300GB of My Maxtor backup drive.
I shipped the drive to this company in US, here is the link
They are very professional and the cost is reasonable comparing of this invaluable data, be sure they will recover every single file.
http://www.acsdata.com/data-recovery-form.htm
Hope this will help you
Zaidoun
If you date is worth it, seriously, there are a bunch of companies that I can recommend to you that would retrieve most of the stuff, the cost is huge however.
Couple of years back, same thing happened to me, and I had to do all sort of aerobics to get my data back. Luckily, I’m fluent in that arena, and after 36 hours straight, I was able to retrieve everything.
Then I took the harddrive, and shot it … yes you heard me right, I took it to a shooting range and Shot it to smithereens
It it was a PC, I would have recommended hooking it up to a desktop and trying to retrieve the data, but MAC sucks in these things (no offence)
Oh and كل عام و انتم بخير
oh my god! i’m really sorry to hear the bad news! hope you mange to retrieve the data.
Salam,
Happy Holidays !
Please visit us at the new Jordan Blogs portal: (http://jordanblogs.net)
Peace
ooops. the loss is mutual. so we will not be getting those diwan pics
its happened to me also 5 years back with my G4 60GB HD, i dont remember the brand of it.. but i remember i used a recovery software on another machine of course.. and i accessed to the files and restored them.
the process was done on a PC computer.
i mean, try every possible way before shipping outside the town.
good luck ahmad!
Hussein
Salam,
That happend to me but I have windows I am not sure if that will be the same.. but I bought a software called “Recover My Files http://www.getdata.com” and it took 7 days but it did recover almost every file.
Just don’t touch the computer when it is searching for files.. it iwll freez up on you…
you can dowload the software from http://www.getdata.com and the cost is nothing compare to data recovary companies.
I hope this helps. Let me know
you can also buy it much less on ebay
http://cgi.ebay.com/RECOVER-MY-FILES-DATA-RECOVERY-SOFTWARE-RRP-69-95_W0QQitemZ330069173612QQihZ014QQcategoryZ3806QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
I hate when this happens, it happened to me once :s a while ago, i costed me about 100 Euros to get my files recovered..
You said: “But it seems I might have lost very precious data accumulated over 10 years. Music, documentes, presentations. You name it.”
Now, do you want to tell me that you never backuped your data at least few times in the last 10 YEARS! 10 YEARS man? You must be kidding…
I just can’t believe it, that one won’t backup at least for few times within 10 years, just beyond me
Cheers
Hi Ahmad,
If you didn’t already send your disk away, you might want to try this:
plug a firewire between your friend mac and a good one. start them both up but hold down the the T button on the fried one. if you are lucky, the drive still might show up on the desktop of the good mac and you can pull your data off.
this happened to my powerbook, exact same problem. even thought though the hard drive didn’t appear on the computer itself, it showed up on another computer and i was able to save my data.
good luck. i know just how you feel.
my hard disk crashed and it cannot read and i need my files,please i need suggestions on what to do my email add is
For physical crash Hard-disk please check the http://www.hdrconline.com. They are having good tools for platter exchange and read write exchange tools.
corin
The ebst software that can retrieve the data if there is no physical damage to your drive is spinrite.
However it will take quite (days) a while to do the deapest level scan (which is what you should do). Aside fromt he success stories you will find on the site, I would add my own.
My brother dropped my sisters ultra thin Sony Vaio laptop on the floor (tile no carpet), it went crack boom, and not only could no data be read, windows owuldn’t startup, trying to bootup anything (floopy, xp cd, 98se bootdisk, linux installation cd), all of the above would crash on boot or simply hang. Spinrite bypassed all that ebcause spinrite doesn’t read form the os, it goes to the hardware directly. Suffice it to say after 48 hours of none stop scanning and fixing all data was back to normal, and my sister bought a portable hard drive so that next time she can have a backup. (yes people never do that until somehting like this happens).
http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite