a rotten Apple

[stealthcello]

I am seriously bummed: my MacBook's hard disk has died. Although we have tried many things to revive it and/or retrieve my data, the drive is just not responding to *anything*. We are talking severe hardware failure here. Dead dead dead. (Deader, in fact, than the unlucky mouse that was recently caught by our momma cat and used as an educational

Comments

[ravenslolita]

I'm not sure about your mac book but i know for other types of hard drives you can get a hard drive adapter that can allow you to slave the drive to your pc and you might be able to save some of your files this way.

This happened to me a few years back and this is how I was able to save a some of my files of off my laptop when my hard drive failed.

Here is a website that might help you out some:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/hardware/soa/How-to-extract-data-from-a-dead-laptop/0,139023759,139116424,00.htm

Best of luck,
Mika

[stealthcello]

Thanks, Mika... good website reference, that... By mounting the drive in an external drive housing, we did manage to extract ~15GB of something off the drive before it began clicking madly to itself, keeled over on its back with its furry little legs in the air, and completely stopped responding. Unfortunately, our PC-based utilities are unable to make any sense of the data we did get. I'm hoping that once the Mac is repaired, I'll be able to find a Mac-based file-recovery utility that can recover something usable from that 15GB. (The drive had about 110GB of data on it; I'd be grateful to recover even a small portion of that.)

[solarbird]

Oh, okay. I am full of unhelpful down below. Foo. Sorry! Normally people on my friendslist are not up to things like external housings.

[stealthcello]

Your suggestions below were right spang on target, and "unhelpful" only because I'd already tried them; and you couldn't possibly have known that...

And, your idea re using the command line to copy files from the iPod will, I hope, be very helpful once my Mac's fixed. (The third-party utility I was thinking of -- Red Chair Software's Anapod Explorer -- has received VERY mixed reviews, as has their customer service. So, if I can get the files off my iPod without having to deal with Red Chair, that will be a Very Good Thing Indeed.)

[solarbird]

(Although iTunes won't let you copy songs from your iPod to a new computer/drive, I believe there is some third-party software that will.)
You can in fact mount it as a drive and copy the files over. They're just set hidden; if you know your way around a command line (shell, terminal, pick your name) it's pretty easy. ^_^

If you have another a Mac, and you hold down T at power up and have it connected by firewire to the laptop, the laptop firmware should bring it the drive up in external-slave-drive mode, which you can access from the other mac. If you haven't tried this, you might.

(Also, does the laptop battery have any power at all? If the battery charge is at absolute zero, you'll get nothing. And, also, have you tried resetting the PRAM and NVRAM? Corrupt PRAM/NVRAM will emulate a head hard drive very well. Instructions on fixing that here: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238 )

[stealthcello]

Thanks for the info re the iPod; I may be asking you for more details on that once my Mac is working again (it's the only Mac we have).

Re the battery -- the HD died while in use, at about 40% battery power. I plugged it in and (when it still didn't respond) reset both PRAM and NVRAM. Ran hardware diagnostics on it & found no problems with the machine itself, but the diagnostics couldn't find the HD. That's the point at which I took it to the Apple store's "Genius Bar." They ran some more diagnostics, attempted to use their HD recovery utility, and finally informed me that my HD was irrevocably dead. He recommended that I send it to DriveSavers for data recovery first, before sending the entire laptop to Apple for repair. (DriveSavers' data recovery quote: $800-$2000. Not an option...)

[atiron]

This is Ben (Norita's husband) posting. I'm sure you've tried just about everything, but if you want, I do own some specialized hardware and software that has in the past rescued all sorts of things from dead drives. Let me (or Norita) know if you'd like me to take a stab at either the drive or the 15 gigs of whatever you grabbed.

[stealthcello]

Hi Ben

[pondside]

I was going to make a couple of helpful suggestions but I see they have already been made :)

Hopefully you'll be able to retrieve everything that isn't retrievable some other way! I'm still at the "omg it's hung -- what do you do when your mac hangs" stage with mine. Your post reminds me that backing up even more frequently than I do would be a good thing for this MAC since it's my recording studio.

question -- (gratuitous and selfserving) Do you have convenient access to recording equipment of digital persuasion? Or the urge to visit Victoria BC for a short visit? If so, is it possible that you might be willing to ply your wonderful cello talents for a session on my CD? I'm almost finished and need one more cello track. Can I plead for assistance for cello for a great song Shaddyr wrote that is just crying for cello? The wonderful gal (Alyssa Wright) who tracked my other cello needs is back East in Ontario with two-way snail mail being the only option and no studio time for the next month or two. I'm two weeks from wrapping up

ah, cello - a much nicer topic than dead Macs

[stealthcello]

Re cello -- I would love to help you out with that, if we can work out the logistics. I do have a good cello mic (a RodeNT1a), but my "home recording studio" was my MacBook, which is, as you know, currently out of commission. (I do have two other multi-track digital recording tools, but I really hate them.) However, I have some ideas re some other options, and also have an idea re how to expedite the Mac repair if need be. Let's talk... drop me an email at betsy at trickypixie dot com... :-)

Re: ah, cello - a much nicer topic than dead Macs

[pondside]

Squeeeeee

Further squeeage transferred to email...

squeee

Re: ah, cello - a much nicer topic than dead Macs

[solarbird]

What do you use for recording, btw? Garage Band or do you have something, I dunno, smarter?

damn and blast

[s00j]

though it seems you've got the best help possible in Ben and other friends here.

sad for the Macbook.
sad for the lost songlets.
I hope very very much that you get them back.

Knoxville is gorgeous. Wish you were here.

[pondside]

Just checking that my email of a few days ago got through...

spam filters being what they are and all. twas from juliana at mylastname dot com

mccorison