Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with datarecovery

Help me recover data from an old iBook HDD

saraswati — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 09:38:51 -0800

How can I recover data from an iBook (G4) HDD using my new Intel-based MacBook? A few years ago I had an iBook G4 that died of a logic board failure. The HDD, as far as I know, is still intact. I have a MacBook now and would really like to retrieve some things that I never backed up from that old drive. What's the easiest way for me to do this myself? Are there any external enclosures I could use that would just work with an iBook drive right out of the box? Thanks!

"Sorry I lost all of your data..."

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:11:42 -0800

I was working on someone's laptop and all of their data has been overwritten. How do I break it to them gently? They had a funky video problem; initially it seemed that reinstalling the OS would be necessary, and the owner balked at the idea of having to backup / restore data and reinstall apps (which I'd certainly do, for a fee).

The video problem began appearing in safe mode and BIOS, so I was able to get the motherboard replaced using depot repair. I explained that I'd be able to remove "the" hard drive before sending it in, so he wouldn't lose anything.

In my rush to get it sent in quickly at the end of a long day, I removed "the" hard drive but as it turns out, this laptop had two drives and the one I removed was blank, and in no danger...

So yeah, they replaced the motherboard, and wiped / reimaged the primary drive (which really wasn't necessary, !$#*!# but I expected as much).

I consider myself pretty competent and just did a shoddy job here. It sucks big-time; I am very contrite but need to broach the subject gently. I'm thinking I'll ask "so, did you know that your laptop has two hard driveS?" because I'm pretty sure he doesn't. Would've been nice to tell me when I said "I'll remove *the* hard drive for you" but I know it really wasn't hard to miss and I just wasn't thinking about it.

I know he has an external drive but I suspect he hasn't been backing up.

Typically, the geek answer is "you're responsible for your data above all else, and should've backed it up before the laptop left your hands." The video problem didn't make the laptop 100% unusable, so he could've done this (and he was familiar with Safe Mode, and had been using it just fine).

However, I consider myself trustworthy and competent, and imagine myself to be "that person" you entrust your laptop with, knowing they'll carefully back everything up twice before wiping anything out, and maybe even keep your 30GB worth of personal data for awhile (disclosed, of course) or burn it to DVD, saving your rear when you manage to blow it away.

This was a huge mistake, a learning experience for both parties, and I'm dreading the conversation.

I'm pretty sure the odds of recovery are about nonexistent: format, re-image, boom. I don't know how many "motions I should go through" to demonstrate this, whether I should be paying for software that has little to no chance of doing anything, or what sort of liability I should try to accept for causing the problem. I'm certainly not planning to charge for time spent troubleshooting and coordinating the repair.

Looking For A Data Recovery Company

Brian Puccio — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 14:47:02 -0800

Please recommend a data recovery/harddrive recovery firm, familiarity with HFS+ filesystems a plus. I've got a dead harddrive that spins up and shows one partition, but I cannot repair it either under OS X or with a Linux live CD. I've tried a few software packages, but none of them get any data off the drive. (Though Data Rescue II does show a list of the file names, when I restored a file, it didn't open, so it can see the files, it's just returning corrupt data.) Before you all say "restore from your backups" this is my backup disk, specifically, my Time Machine backup harddrive.

I'm in the US and will ship pretty much anywhere and pay the considerable amount of money it will probably cost to recover the data (mostly images - CR2 files) from this drive.

Thanks!

DeadMacFilter: Will Target Disk mode screw up my healthy computer?

neroli — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 08:22:49 -0800

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? (Note: I’m a total computer illiterate. Or rather, I have been a total computer illiterate—I don’t want to be any more. So, apologies in advance for obvious dimness.)

My long-ailing ancient iMac finally bit the dust. Can only boot from the (OS 9) system disk; hard drive won’t mount. Ran Disk Repair: “MountCheck found serious errors.” Tried to repair many times: no go.

Now, this isn’t a terrible tragedy. I knew the old guy was on its last legs. I have back-ups of pretty much all my important files—on CDs and on my work computer. It isn’t worth it to me to pay for a data recovery service. I don’t even want to spend the money and the effort to get Disk Warrior. But there were some photos and documents on the G3 that I don’t have a copy of. Nothing essential, but it would be nice to have them back.

I hadn’t saved up enough to buy to the new machine I wanted, but I got a really good deal on a refurb G4 iMac (800 MHz, PowerPC, running Tiger), which I figured would keep me going for the time being. And actually, I like this computer a lot. I want to keep it healthy as long as possible.

So: I have a working computer, a dead computer, and a FireWire cable. Trying to mount the hard disk on the working machine with target disk mode looks relatively straightforward, even for someone like me. I’m not holding out much hope that I’ll be able to get the files, but I’d like to try one more thing before I give up.

But before I do this, I want to be totally, absolutely sure that this won’t cause any unforeseen problems on the healthy machine. I know it’s no spring chicken itself. I have a 60-day hardware warranty and no system disk for the G4. I really, really don’t want to screw it up. (I don’t care what happens to the G3, and I’ve pretty much given up the data for lost, so no worries on that end.)

Can someone who knows something about all this either reassure me or warn me off? Many thanks.

Help me examine my FAT.

harkin banks — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:32:38 -0800

How can I figure out what file a particular FAT32 sector belongs to? I recently used ddrescue to recover data from an old 30 GB drive that had gone bad. ddrescue took about 24 hours to run, but when it finished I had a 99.99+% good copy, with only about 70 errors. The partition information is OK, so I can read the new drive with no problem. So far, so good.

Now I'd like to figure out which files the unreadable sectors belong to, so I know if any important files were compromised files. I have the ddrescue logfile, which lists the drive contents as blocks of readable/unreadable sectors. How can I use this output to figure out which files were not recovered completely?

I've seen this post on the ddrescue mailing list (linked to by flabdablet in a previous question about data recovery), but my drive is FAT32, and MSFT's nfi.exe doesn't work for non-NTFS drives. I found another post on the ddrescue mailing list by the same author, in which he links to a Perl program of his that looks up FAT32 filenames based on input from the ddrescue logfile. Exactly what I need, right? However, the program is listed as "under construction" in his post, and it doesn't work for me with sectors numbered above about 10,000,000. Unfortunately all but 8 or 9 of my unreadable sectors are above that threshold. I've banged my head against its 1500 lines of code for the last week or so trying to find the reason it fails and succeeded only in making my head hurt. (I emailed the author about it last weekend and have gotten no response.)

I did the initial ddrescue-ing on an ancient Pentium II running Debian Sarge, but I also have a more modern machine running Win XP. Any suggestions?

data recovery on iPhone?

Countess Elena — Sun, 11 May 2008 14:58:33 -0800

Can you save data from an iPhone, in any manner, once it has entered "recovery" mode and iTunes informs you that you need to restore the phone? I know that a more technical-minded person wouldn't have let this happen, and I promise I checked out the manual on this. I know I'm a goober for using iTunes; please do not chide me! Here's what happened.

1. I take a bunch of great pictures today, and plug in the iPhone to upload them.

2. It has been a few weeks since I last did so, and iTunes offers me a software upgrade. I say yes.

3. Big mistake.

4. iTunes could not finish installing the software because "an unknown error occurred." It seems as if the connection was physically interrupted, but I don't know how.

5. iTunes then informs me that the phone was in "recovery mode" and I couldn't use iTunes without either restoring or using something called "iBoot."

6. But my pictures! And I don't have iBoot. What the hell is iBoot? My iPhone will not respond.

7. As the computer does not appear to perceive that the iPhone is connected, and a disconnection sound was made, I remove it and turn the phone on and off a few times. Although responding to button commands, the iPhone will only return to a screen showing the cord and an iTunes logo.

8. I hate this piece of shit slow-ass Toshiba oh my God I hate it I hate it.

9. I try Google, and am confused by all the possibilities for the problem and the recovery.

10. I try this question.

Can I retrieve my pictures? Are the data recovery applications I find on Google reputable and useful in this situation? Thank you so much for your help.

scsi pci raid server died, urgent data recovery?

tslugmo — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 11:46:12 -0800

Got a 2000 server with PCI SCSI RAID card (Mirror) and the mobo seems to have died. I just want to recover the data and host it on another machine. How do I do that? I've installed the PCI card in another computer running XP, and in Disk Mgmt I saw "Import Foreign Disk" which I did, and now I see both volumes. Then I click on Reactivate Disk, but it does not change anything. The volume reads Failed (Active).

Any ideas? Super time-sensitive!

Getting Vista To See The Contents Of An Old W98 HD

scrump — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 14:28:16 -0800

How do I pull data from an old Windows 98 HD using Vista? I've got a Vista Pro machine to which I want to transfer files from an old Windows 98 machine. The key facts about the old machine are that it doesn't have a CD burner, nor does it have an ethernet port.

I can, however, pull the HD and connect it to the Vista machine. After doing so, I see the machine's native HD (360GB), and the old Fujitsu drive (as D:). However, all I see on the Fujitsu drive is a partition called RECOVERY. I can't cd to D:\, either.

I tried changing security settings, and Vista promptly showed me a dialog in which the names of plenty of files scrolled by: the content I want to recover is clearly /there/, but for some reason I can't "see" it in Vista.

Any thoughts on why this might be?

Why is my harddrive empty?

A! — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 07:12:22 -0800

My windows didn't want to boot up, so I bought a new hard disc installed Windows on it and made the old one slave. The old hard disc reads as completely empty. Why? The old disc has two partitions, and the second partition I can read and move files etc, but the main partition where windows was/is reads as empty, so I was wondering if anyone has an idea of why this could be? Of course any solution would be great, too! Thank you!

ipod amnesia

Doug — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 15:37:06 -0800

How do I recover music from an iPod that has suddenly reset itself? A friend lent me her iPod a few months ago. I never connected it to my computer, but I’d charged it and used it a few times. The other day I turned it on and it had mysteriously returned to the factory settings. No music on it at all. Unfortunately, my friend had several original, irreplaceable copies of songs she’d written on the iPod. I need to recover those songs!

Important to note: I have a pc, and do not currently have iTunes installed. Also, the computer my friend had the iPod synced with has since broken.

Clone a laptop drive

killdevil — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 10:05:31 -0800

What is the easiest way to make a bit-perfect copy of a potentially failing laptop hard drive? The copy target would be a new 2.5" drive that I'd then install in the same laptop. I'd like to clone my laptop hard drive onto a replacement drive. The copy target would be a new laptop drive. Whatever mechanism I use to copy data would ideally a) not be derailed by bit errors (the current drive IS failing, after all) and b) be able to enumerate which files are corrupt, if any.

I'm running Windows XP, but would be willing to boot into a Linux CD distribution, etc... I'm a pretty sophisticated user, just not an I.T. guy with copies of Ghost lying around (and don't recommend Norton Ghost, please; it's over-complicated and I hate it).

Accidentally repartitioned drive - can I recover files?

jbb7 — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 07:27:12 -0800

I was going to repartition an external USB hard drive in Mac OS X 10.4 in Disk Utility, and after I clicked Partition, I thought I clicked Cancel when I learned it would result in data loss. I guess I actually clicked OK, and then I quickly quit Disk Utility and disconnected the drive (it had already been unmounted). Now, when I reconnect the drive, it shows up as having been repartitioned, and all of the data on there is gone. Can I get my data back? It only had about 4 seconds of being connected before I cancelled and unplugged it. I am sure that all of the bits are still on there, but the partition table seems to have been nuked. Is it possible to recover the files without sending the disk to DriveSavers? (It's mostly backups, but there are some original photos not backed up anywhere else that I would really like to recover.)

All partitions are Mac OS Extended (Journaled). The disk is a 500 GB Western Digital external USB hard drive.

Gillware - good or bad?

matildaben — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 15:42:06 -0800

Does anyone have experiences with Gillware for recovering data from a dead hard drive, aside from user bhance? They are cheaper than the big enterprise-level data recovery companies, but I'd like to see comments from more than one person if possible.

Rescuing Word Files with Knoppix

Danf — Mon, 07 May 2007 11:48:57 -0800

How do I get Knoppix to read .doc files? Through a rather steep and lengthy learning curve, I have booted up my ailing XP laptop with a Knoppix CD. It sees the MSWord files of my wife's writing, but does not recognize them as .doc files, and when I try either to drag or copy them to the floppy drive, I get a message: "could not determine file type, and none was specified."

Knoppix sees that there are some KB worth of data in those files.

What now?

(and I would be delighted to find out that this is a double, but I could not find anything either in AskMeFi or anywhere else on the web.

How do I recover a lost filesystem that has been partially overwritten?

oneous — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 14:00:49 -0800

I accidentally formatted my NTFS drive with HFS and wrote some data on it. Now how do I recover whatever is left? >>>Any filesystem experts around here? I was installing Mac OS 9 on an old iMac and accidentally chose the installation volume as my big external USB disk with all my important data. I had 250GB of files in NTFS on it, and the Mac OS 9 install was only a few hundred MB, so there should still be a large amount of data untouched. I want to recover anything I can (including partial/corrupted files) that still remain in NTFS.

I'd appreciate some app/method recommendations, as well as some help understanding how filesystems work and what exactly has happened.

I clobbered a file by saving a download with the same name, and would like to recover my data.

rkent — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 10:03:08 -0800

I clobbered a file by saving a downloaded file with the same name. Options? OK, I have searched past questions and the nearest hit I found was this one, which seems distinct from my situation. Here's what happened:

1) Edit file on computer 1, email to self
2) D/L file to computer 2, edit in MS Word, save.
3) Forget that I had edited, download from email over the edited copy!

This is different from the situation in the post above, because there it appeared that doing a ctrl-S also clobbered all the autosaved copies; in my situation that's (hopefully) not the case. Obviously the advantages of CVS or Perforce are now vividly clear to me, but now is the time for data recovery, not self-flagellation.

So, what can I do to get the version I had saved in step 2? If there are autosaves, where are they (Office 2K on Windows XP)? Or, is there a free/cheap tool that can search unallocated blocks so that I could at least maybe recover the unformatted text and paste it into a new document? I'm assuming here that clobbering the filename does not also place the new file in the same disc blocks, though the FAT will obviously no longer point to the old blocks.

Anything else I could try? The data (and my time) are worth enough that the situation might merit downloading a commercial tool, but not hiring an outside recovery service.

How to crack a disk image

alms — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 15:01:58 -0800

How can I run a dictionary attack against a password-protected disk image file on OS X? I created the disk image, but have forgotten the password. I'm pretty certain that the password I used would be short and not terribly fancy, so it should succumb to a brute-force attack pretty quickly, if I knew how to run one against it.

Help me recover my data!

Effigy2000 — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:50:54 -0800

My hard drive died and I want to recover a great deal of the data that (hopefully) still exists on it. After reading the Metafilter Wiki, I know this question has been asked before, but my question relates more to the process of recovering the data than the actual possibility of doing so. One day, while booting my computer, my hard drive up and died telling me that the boot sector had failed. This was annoying given I had a great deal of unbacked up data on it. I installed a new hard drive and went on my way, assuming my precious data was gone forever and I'd just have to rebuild.

But after reading the Metafilter Wiki, I learned that not only was it possible to recover data from dead hard drives, but that programs existed which allowed one to do it theselves. So now I intend to go about rescuing that data and hopefully restoring my sanity. I think I know what I need to do but was hoping to get confirmation from the hive mind. Correct me if I'm wrong.

First of all, my new drive is a SATA RAID drive. My old drive is an old standard IDE drive. I plan to install the dead drive into my machine as the primary slave. All good so far, or will the two drive types create some kind of conflict?

After that's done, I assume I simply install one of these programs from within Windows XP which will then somehow allow me to move the data I want to the new drive. Is this correct?

Finally, before I set about this process, is there anything else seasoned vetrans of this kind of thing could tell me, or is there anything else I need to know, to make sure everything goes nice and smoothly?

Thanks in advance!

How can I get my protected files back?

borkingchikapa — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 11:08:25 -0800

My motherboard died, and now I need to hook the harddrives up to another PC to get the data off. Problem: Some of it was in the "My Documents" folder, and I can't get to it without being logged on to an admin account. I have no way of doing that, since I can't boot from the old windows installation anymore. Is there some trick or program that will let me into the protected files on my old account? They're clearly there, as everything else on the HD is, but it yells at me about privileges when I try to get to them. We're talking about XP here, if it matters.

the case of the disappearing desktop data

needs more cowbell — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 12:46:34 -0800

Firefox-Is-On-CrackFilter: I deleted a non-default Firefox profile and things got deleted from my desktop...not just icons, but folders that I was storing there. How do I recover them? The long story is that my computer got unplugged while it was on, and when I turned it back on, Firefox was screwed up: all of the tweaks I'd made (icons I'd added to the toolbar, any bookmarks--luckily I mostly use del.icio.us--, additional searchbox engines...but not saved passwords, cookies, or extensions) were gone. Not a big deal, but when I re-tweaked everything, the changes disappeared each time I closed and re-opened Firefox.

I made a new Firefox profile to see if the problem would carry over to the new profile. It didn't. I was going to simply set everything up again in the new profile, but then I decided I might as well back up my old profile entirely, uninstall Firefox completely, and reinstall it. I figured that first I'd delete the new profile I'd just made so that I could be 100% sure that the profile I backed up was the (old) one I wanted and not the new one.

When I deleted the new profile (using the firefox profile manager), suddenly anything on my desktop that was actually a file (as opposed to a shortcut) disappeared. These files aren't in the recycle bin and don't show up when I search for them by name in Explorer. It was probably stupid of me to be storing files on the desktop instead of in My Documents, but what can I do to get them back? This seems really bizarre.

Deleted Google Scratch Pad!

mabelstreet — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 08:30:05 -0800

I tried to "clear" a selected portion of my Google Desktop Scratch Pad, and it cleared the entire contents. I can't figure out any way to restore it ("undo" didn't do anything, and there's very little documentation). I have some hope, because Google describes the Scratch Pad as "automatically" saving as you type. But has it saved over whatever file it uses with a blank slate now? Please help!

Can I recover data (pictures) from a bad DVD-R?

bingwah — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 08:51:57 -0800

Can I recover data (pictures) from a bad DVD-R? I burned a bunch of my pictures to a DVD-R (Memorex brand which I now hear sucks).

I stupidly didn't check the DVD before deleting the pictures off my hard drive. That hard drive is long gone now. All I have is the DVD.

Basically I can see the reference to the pictures on the DVD but when I go to click on one it freezes my computer.

Would a data recovery place be able to get these pictures off the DVD or are they gone forever? Any reccomendations for good data recovery shops?

It just works, right?

mds35 — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 19:30:48 -0800

Data recovery in target disk mode: what are the pitfalls? A friend of mine has a G4 iBook that is dead. He has been told by a computer repair person (non-Apple) that his logic board is hosed. He'd like to save his old iTunes and iPhoto libraries to his new MacBook Pro. I told him about Target Disk Mode and offered to perform the transfer for him, but he's wary and is afraid of losing some of his photos forever. Is target disk mode fairly safe, assuming there is no damage to the HD on his old iBook? Also, is target mode even possible if the logic board is hosed? What if the power supply on the iBook is dead? Is there any thing I should beware of?

My Hard Drive Crashed. What now?

maxreax — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 08:57:17 -0800

My 12" Powerbook G4's hard drive has gone belly up. Help me figure out my options. My hard drive crashed in a serious, unfuckwitable way mid-day yesterday. After exhausting my own technical know-how, I took it to the Apple Store, who told me (basically) that it's unrecoverable due to hardware damage (it makes a reallllly scary spraypaint-can clicking noise when turned on). I attempted to target boot it to my girlfriend's computer (from where I am writing this question), but it won't mount. This, it seems to me, is a v. bad thing. So: I would like to know what, exactly, my options are.

1) a) Obviously, I need to get my hard drive replaced. I would do this myself, but I've heard that the 12" Powerbooks are difficult to pry open (and instruction manuals I found online back this up). Is this true? Is there anyone who's done it? If I decide that I don't feel comfortable doing it, can anyone recommend a Los Angeles-area Mac service store that will do it quickly, well and cheaply?

b) Should I just spring for a new computer? My Powerbook's not in great shape--sticky keyboard, dead line of pixels on the screen, bumps and dents all over. What's the lifespan for the rest of the hardware parts on these machines, and if I do replace the hard drive, how much longer am I looking at? Am I better off just buying a new Macbook?

2) a) At this point, how likely is non-heavy-duty data recovery? From what I can tell, most places recommend (if the drive wont mount in the computer itself) removing it and placing it in a firewire enclosure, and trying to get it to mount from there. Is this something that I could do? (I suppose this is a similar question to 1a). When I attempted to target-boot the laptop, wasn't I basically doing the same thing--and if it doesn't show up then, am I basically fucked? Is there a store that would do this for me (if it's even worth doing), and how much would they charge/would they charge if it ended up not working?

b) Assuming that I will never be able to mount my hard drive again, is there a Los Angeles-area data recovery service that will do it for fairly cheaply (I understand that in this case that might mean something like $500), or is that just wishful thinking? Considering that the hard drive is making the bad noise and I've tried to turn it on several times, I'm worried that I've damaged it even further. What's the likelihood of that, and how much will that affect other people's attempts to fix it?

Hard drive sparking - is data recovery possible?

gd779 — Wed, 31 May 2006 06:01:45 -0800

My hard drive recently started sparking, then smoking and burning. I quickly turned off the computer, but now I need to recover my data. I can see the spot on the hard drive that is black, so I know where the problem is. Is it safe for me to spend thirty minutes or so backing data off of this damaged drive? Alternatively, is it possible to repair the drive, at least enough to backup my data? Or have I lost everything? Thanks in advance for your suggestions!