Retrieving data from crashed hard drive

I finally got around to installing my new hard drive and getting a new operating system on my Mac. My old hard drive failed and I didn't have it backed up(lesson learned). Has anyone here had any luck pulling data from a failed hard drive? From what Geek Squad told me it needs to go into a clean room and they have to pull data from the magnets inside the drive? They said it would be $550 and thats no guarantee I'll get any of my data back. Anyone have this happen and have any places to look at that are cheaper and have some promising results?
 
Depends on how it failed
click of death? not likely to get much off of it
electrical failure? maybe

either way an expensive lesson!!
 

It depends on how it failed...

Commonly, you can hook it up to another PC as a slave drive - and can read it just as an additional hard drive on the PC - no muss, no fuss.

But depending on what exactly went wrong, a forensics-type recovery (the clean room deal) may be your only bet. I work in IT, and we've had to send off 3 hard drives over the years - in each case, they recovered everything - but also, in each case, it was about $1,000...


Howard
 
(quoted from post at 15:07:34 10/10/16) I finally got around to installing my new hard drive and getting a new operating system on my Mac. My old hard drive failed and I didn't have it backed up(lesson learned). Has anyone here had any luck pulling data from a failed hard drive? From what Geek Squad told me it needs to go into a clean room and they have to pull data from the magnets inside the drive? They said it would be $550 and thats no guarantee I'll get any of my data back. Anyone have this happen and have any places to look at that are cheaper and have some promising results?
As others have mentioned it depends on how it failed. I have heard of placing a hard drive in a freezer for several hours and, somehow, the drive will work to get data from it. otherwise your option is to send it to a lab to have the data professionally recovered and they will do the job. the cardinal rule of computers is backup, backup and backup.
 
I have not done it on a Mac but I had a Windows 7 drive fail. I later used an external USB converter and bumped the power off and on several times and got the drive to start up and was able to recover my data. It depends on why your hard drive failed.
 
You might want to try SpinRite (https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm). It's $89 so it isn't cheap, but if it works it's a deal compared to sending the drive out. It's also good for drive maintenance before getting into a situation where you need to recover data.
 
Are you sure it's the hard drive? Just restored a system (Compaq) last night. It would not boot. Wound up being bad RAM. Put in new RAM and system fired right up.
 
Take your old Hard Drive to your local Computer Shop and purchase a "HDD Enclosure" for your old Hard Drive (about $20.) , it should come with it's own USB Cord. When you have the old Hard Drive installed in the Enclosure, then plug in the USB Cord to both the Enclosure & your Computer, your Computer will see the Enclosure as an External Storage Device, Right Mouse Click and Open Files on the old Hard Drive. Copy & Paste to your NEW Hard Drive.

HTH

Doc
 
There are many different ways a hard disk can crash. The term "crash" really refers to the disk head colliding with the disk and damaging the storage medium. That seldom happens these days because disks have self-parking heads. Sometimes it's just a matter of the disk not spinning due to friction or a failed motor. You can usually listen to the drive and tell if it's spinning up to speed. If you want to run the risk of opening the drive (assuming you don't have a clean room), you might be able to get a stuck drive to spin just by giving the platters a nudge.

Usually, though, the problem isn't physical but bad data in the boot sector, partition table or directory. In these cases, the data on disk is fine, but you can't get to it, either because the PC won't boot or the OS can't find the files. I'm not familiar with the Mac file system, so I don't know how hard it is to recover data from it. File recovery on the Windows FAT and HPFS file systems is fairly simple, while recovering data from inode-based file systems on UNIX/Linux is quite difficult.

Although they like to make it sound exotic, what the data recovery folks due is usually simple: If they can't recover the data with software, they remove the platters from the failed drive and install them in a good drive. The reason they charge so much is because they CAN. You have to decide whether your data is worth 550 bucks.

I've had some success getting data off PCs that wouldn't boot by booting them with a Linux CD, then copying the files to a USB drive or network filesystem.

My recommendation is for you to google "Mac file system data recovery" to see what tools and techniques are available. Get one of the USB devices others have suggested so you can mount the drive without booting from it and go from there.
 

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