Help recover corrupt hard drive

[shabtek]

Osx disk utility wont mount a partition, is there A way to recover files?

 

[JohnRoberts]

computers suck... knock wood mine is working OK

a few months ago I invested in a good solid state back up drive and used that to load my old files onto my new computer.

JR

 

[shabtek]

Make a backup/timemachine while you can!

 

[Bo Deadly]

What is the error exactly? Take a pic with your phone and post it. Is it just one partition? Can you mount any other partitions on the drive successfully? Can you mount it read-only (maybe go low-level and use mount command from terminal)? Is this the system drive or secondary or external? What kind of drive is it? M.2 ssd or hard disk? How savvy are you at debugging this stuff?

 

[JohnRoberts]

I have made half hearted attempts at backing up my computers for decades. I even used old school magnetic tape backups. More recently I had an external network hard drive for back ups but for some reason time machine would not talk to it. I didn't get time machine really working properly until a few months ago with the plug in SSD.

I have been relatively lucky over the decades surviving through multiple generations of small computer technology. I don't like apple the company, but I like apple the computer (mini). I used to be irritated by how much they dumbed it down, now I appreciate the security. Since changing to the new platform it has forgotten all of my saved passwords.

Between my credit card being hacked twice over the last few months (i still have a $300 airplane ticket charge they haven't purged) and the new computer forgetting my passwords I am constantly playing catch up.

JR

 

[shabtek]

@Bo Deadly
I have minimal experience, was trying to force boot in terminal but not sure my commands were any good. Its a ssd with 2 partitions. In an external enclosure (now)l can force boot from the10.8 partition but it wont boot the other (important) updated os version partition that i have been using for a year and neglected to backup.

This partition is grayed out in disk utility, has no mount point or format info.

Once i had enough of waiting for it to boot/ force restarting i got it to boot from recovery or safe mode, i did check disk and repair permissions in utility, then when i went to set this partition as boot drive it gave a message about not being kosher with “bless tool”.

I am presently away but can take pic later if it will help.

Thanks

 

[Tubetec]

There are a few third party linux recovery utillities that you can run from a USB stick , the right one should allow you to view the contents of a hard drive and copy off files that are of value to you .
I have no experience of Apple , so do make sure what ever software you use is compatible .

Ive never trusted this idea of a 'time machine' type backup , or system restore in windows , I always copy the important files to an external drive totally independant of the OS . Making a backup drive bootable , thats asking for trouble .

 

[Bo Deadly]

So it is (or was) a boot partition and you're trying to boot from one or the other?

It sounds like it's simply not bootable. What evidence do you have that anything is "corrupt" and that anything needs to be recovered?

I would try mounting the drive using conventional mount commands from a terminal just to see that it is alive and well. Mount it read only first, navigate around. Then unmount and mount writable and see if you can create a file somewhere. If that all goes well, your drive is fine. Booting is a completely separate issue and unfortunately not a process I'm familiar with for OSX. But I do know enough to know that trying to make a partition bootable could easily break the working partition so take care.

 

[cyrano]

I used to use TestDisk when I was doing data recovery:

https://www.cgsecurity.org/
Open source, free and the best I ever found. Repairs and extracts data, but can also fix the boot sector of a drive that doesn't boot.

There's a forum for help and the author, Christophe Grenier, answers questions in English, German and French.

The name of this program is a bit of a problem, as you can hardly find it via search engines.

There's also "Data rescue 6" if you prefer a gui. Not free, but very good at data recovery. No disk repair.

https://www.prosofteng.com/mac-data-recovery
There's a demo version for download before you buy. It will extract a limited number of files.

 

[capacitorless]

+1 to TestDisk (or similar) and copying a compromised filesystem out to an external usb drive.

Is it repeatedly clicking? That's usually the failure situation that I'm personally used to dealing with.

 

[shabtek]

Thanks folks.

I will try test disk or and some other suggestions.

 

[Matador]

There is an image called SystemResuceCD, which you can boot from a USB stick. Inside, it has file system recovery tools, such as fsck.hfsplus for HFS+ partitions, etc. It has saved my bacon countless times.

 

[Whoops]

Thanks folks.

I will try test disk or and some other suggestions.

Sometime ago I was able to recover the data from a friends hard drive that had the same problem with yours with a data recovery software for MAC.
I don't remember the name of the software but I searched google for "recover hard drive Raw Data Mac".
using "Raw Data" made the difference in getting a specific software for this

 

[shabtek]

APFS format may contribute to my troubles, at least I am hip to it now.
I can open some of the folders so maybe can recover something. Big learning curve for me with command line data recovery

 

[Bo Deadly]

Mmm, yes, that does look like the drive is having trouble. I guess try TestDisk, SystemRescueCD or similar.

 

[shabtek]

well I think I figured out some of the problem. those command line debuggers are pretty over my head and considering how It is set up; recovering everything might be too much trouble.
now I am browsing on the machine (drive) I had retired a year ago--it is working fine with the older osx version--probably get bank hacked now
------------
the problem drive is ssd that had an older version 10.7 i think and then an update to 10.14 on a partition
I always loaded the 10.14--It (the update) is formatted in APFS which is not backwards compatible and only supported in 10.14--and that was my only instance of 10.14...I'd like to get 10.14 reinstalled on that machine and have it all APFS but that may take some doing because I think the only way to get to it is upgrade from older version, if upgrades are even still supported.IIRC it took days to download the update.
when it worked it was snappy, even with many dozen of browser windows each with many tabs open, I should start using bookmarks.

 

[cyrano]

Well, there's no reason to use partitions with APFS, I've been told. No gains in speed, or less fragmentation, or...

And Apple's system upgrades are only reliable on standard Apple hardware. Anything non-standard I only use clean install on empty harddrive or SSD.

 

[pvision]

I've just been through this. Apple changed the preferred disk format between 10.12 and 10.13 (IIRC - please check) to APFS. If you then try to mount an APFS partition on an older system strange things happen - I haven't been able to pin down exactly what

My go-to emergency system is a an external hard drive with a couple of partitions, one of which has a boot system. Boot the machine from this (hold down the option key on startup and choose the external boot drive boot partition as the startup drive) - then use Disk First Aid to try to fix the bad drive

My preferred backup tool is Carbon Copy Cloner. With it you can make a clone of a drive as a one-off backup, or copy files & update the copy when files are added or changed.

A clone, made to a read-write sparse bundle disk image, enables you to recover to a point in time. I always make one after installing & updating a new system, before installing any apps or moving over user data. That way, if any problems occur, I can reinstall the system from the image in minutes

 

[JohnRoberts]

In case I haven't said it lately, computers suck (really)... The good news is my relatively new mac mini is rocking...

One very old XP PC that I use for some old excel spread sheets and some old engineering programs (Eagle PCB/schematic, Corel draw faceplate, etc). I have about 8 pages of passwords in an old excel file...

I noticed that the computer was starting to make new/bad noises. I invested into a portable SSD to grab a quick backup of that hard drive but Nooooo the old windows XP operating system did not recognize the new SSD plugged into the USB port, I was able to grab a few files plugging the SSD into my mac but it wouldn't let me grab protected files so I needed to change the permissions in the old PC... coincidentally the PC allows me to log on with a null password, has worked that way for years, but I can't log onto the old PC from another computer using the same null password.

I have been remiss about hard drive maintenance, I didn't have enough free contiguous space to efficiently defrag the drive so I tried to do it inefficiently.

That was the straw that broke the camels back, and the drive failed...

This morning I dug out my original system CD so I'll see if the RESTORE disk can restore anything.

JR

PS; Coincidentally I booted up my newest PC that I bought around 2015 but apparently haven't turned on since 2018 so it is all tangled up with microsuck handshakes that require passwords I don't remember.

 

[moamps]

In case I haven't said it lately, computers suck (really)...

You did.

...... I invested into a portable SSD to grab a quick backup of that hard drive but Nooooo the old windows XP operating system did not recognize the new SSD plugged into the USB port....

And did you format the disc and give it a name?
You know ...
Control panel/System and Security/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management