Data Recovery Recommendations

[dix]

A drive I was using to archive old projects that I assumed (wrongly) I'd never need again died. It mounted normally and then I heard the famous death-clicks. Hard Disk Utility see's it but that's about all so…: Does anyone have a recommendation for a data recovery company? I'm not in a huge hurry, but I would like to have these files restored at some point.

These guys are the cheapest google has come up with: http://www.nationwidedatarecovery.com

Thanks!

[Michael Canavan]

Hard Disk Utility see's it

If Hard Disc Utility can see it, then it's very possible DiskWarrior can fix it.
At least I had the exact same thing happen, and Disk Warrior was able to fix it.

[dix]

Really? That'd be awesome, but I always thought those clicks meant it was a mechanical failure with the drive. Were you able to resurrect a drive post death-click?

[Michael Canavan]

Yeah, but I only got scratchy disc sounds... I imported everything off of it of course.

[James Steele]

There used to be a pretty cool utility called Data Rescue. There's a demo I think. It might help.

[dix]

Great! I'll try these and post the results. I bought and used Disk Warrior in the OS9 days of old. I may still be registered.

Thanks!

[FMiguelez]

There used to be a pretty cool utility called Data Rescue. There's a demo I think. It might help.

+1

I once blew my HD's partition table by accidentaly reformating it , and Data Rescue recovered all my files overnight.

But that was clearly file structure damage as opposed to physical damage, which appears to be the case here. You should still try it, though.

Good luck and please report back on it.

[James Steele]

But that was clearly file structure damage as opposed to physical damage, which appears to be the case here.

True enough. I don't know what you do about that. There may be services that can deal with it.

[dix]

+1 million

Data Rescue (and motunation!) to the rescue! The demo detected the volume and could see all the missing files. I needed to buy the app to recover them, but it was worth the $100! I haven't recovered everything yet, but the one project I needed today was recovered perfectly. I had no idea you could recover files from hard drives that are that dead. Thanks so much guys!

…almost as amazing is that the DP file from 2007 that I recovered opened up and played perfectly in 7.24 complete with all it's old Kontakt 2 and BFD 1 instances.

Thanks again!

[James Steele]

Whew! Glad to hear it! Data Rescue saved my butt once in a similar situation many years ago. It's a miraculous bit of software!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Excellent!

[mikehalloran]

Whew! Glad to hear it! Data Rescue saved my butt once in a similar situation many years ago. It's a miraculous bit of software!

Same here. I never needed it again but have my serial number handy in case I need to upgrade that runs on current hardware.

[James Steele]

I had no idea you could recover files from hard drives that are that dead. Thanks so much guys!

Many times if you can actually hear the platters spinning inside the drive, Data Rescue can recover it. Even though the drive won't actually mount on the desktop, it can still get to the data on the drive. When you're really in trouble is if the motor is shot and the drive won't spin at all.

[dix]

Hmm. Might have spoken way too soon.

Although Data Rescue saved the day by rescuing the one project I needed, efforts to recover the rest of the data on the disk hasn't been successful. DR said it would take 13 hours to extract the data so I set it up and went to bed. In the morning it said "Rescue aborted because of loss of power to one of the disks" (or something like that) - the drive I'm trying to save is a raw drive running on a dock, so I thought I'd mount it internally and try again tonight, but: When I tried quit DR I got a "background process is still in progress logout to continue" (or something like that). Since the MP was on all night I thought I'd restart instead of logging out. However, instead of restarting I got a No Disk icon! As it is right now I can only boot my Mac into safe mode. I don't know if DR caused this, but since this is the first time anything like this has happened one has to consider that it may be a factor.

…stay tuned. I'm in mid-diagnosis at the moment. I have a reasonably up to date clone of my system so I should be okay eventually.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

It might be the power supply. Can you move the disk to a different enclosure?