Best data rescue software?
January 9, 2015 12:27 PM   Subscribe

The SSD in my Macbook Pro seems to have completely failed. I managed to install OS X onto an external drive and attempted to run DiskWarrior on it. It took almost 24 hours and in the end was not able to repair the disk. It did allow me to mount the disk as read-only, but I'm not able to copy and save 90% of the files. Is there some Windows or Linux based software I could try that might be more thorough or effective?

I'm not sure what actually caused the failure or what the computer was doing when it failed as I wasn't the one using it at the time. Almost every file I try to copy fails with an I/O error but I have managed to copy a few successfully. Is it possible that almost the entire disk would become corrupt and unreadable? I'd expect a few bad sectors and unreadable files but this is almost everything.
posted by Venadium to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
You could give PhotoRec a shot. As long as you copy to something external, then it shouldn't hurt anything.
posted by procrastination at 12:37 PM on January 9, 2015


if you have access to another mac with firewire or thunderbolt, I would do this.

1. turn your sad mac off leave the other one on

2. connect the 2 macs with a firewire 800 cable or a thunderbolt cable

3. boot your sad mac with the T key held down to boot it in target disk mode

4. if it appears on the desktop of the good mac... attempt copying data... if that's a bust, try running diskwarrior from good mac on the drive of the sad mac

5. If the disk doesn't mount, run disk warrior from good mac on sad mac

6. DataRescue is pretty good

7. All drives fail... (I'm an IT guy with 20 years in...) they all fail... so whatever you replace it with, get a second one and use it as a daily backup. Pro Tip... you really only need to back up your account data... it's waaaaay faster to start from scratch and a clean OS than it is to attempt a recovery of an entire system.

8. Apple Time Machine is ok... Carbon Copy Cloner and Chronosync are better and honestly, easier to use.

good luck
posted by bobdow at 12:55 PM on January 9, 2015


Honestly when SSDs go bad, you're hosed. it isn't like a hard drive where you can limp it along and recover some stuff. It's much more of a "either it works, or it doesn't" thing with no middle ground of working crappily.

That said, i'll give my usual recommendation of testdisk. It's saved my ass more than once. It can be very very slow though. I think my last recovery of like, 300gb or something of data took around 30-48 hours.
posted by emptythought at 7:27 PM on January 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


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