Hard drive recovery: my external USB hard drive is mounting fine on both my mac and PC, however, all the files are showing up as garbage characters. [more inside]
posted by mike_bling on Jun 1, 2009 - 4 answers

A friend plugged his Seagate usb external drive into a MacBook Pro and then somehow inadvertantly accepted a prompt to set the drive up for Time Machine backups without thinking. The drive hasn't been written to since then. Is there a way to get the original data back (there's no backup, of course)? Failing that, any recommendations for data recovery services in the UK?
posted by amestoy on Apr 9, 2009 - 9 answers

How can I repair any broken files resulting from power loss during defragmentation? It seems that most file recovery applications want to move everything to a new disk, but this is not a good option for me because I don't have any other drives large enough. I was using iDefrag on my terabyte (My Book) external hard drive. It had gotten almost 21 hours in, and somehow the power cable got unplugged and the battery died. To make a long story short, iDefrag can't see the disk at all, Disk Utility sees the hard drive but not any of the data or the partition itself, and verify and repair are not selectable. [more inside]
posted by N2O1138 on Feb 22, 2009 - 6 answers

Dead hard disk on a G3 iMac. Seemingly healthy 2nd-hand G4 iMac. If I try to access data on the dead machine via target disk mode, is there a chance—any chance at all—that I could screw up the healthy machine? [more inside]
posted by neroli on Aug 3, 2008 - 7 answers