[ale] SOLVED (probably) (NOT!) Re: Rescuing an OS X HD from Linux - partition table hosed

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 13:39 -0500, David Ritchie wrote: 
> If you have a copy of Spinrite (www.grc.com), I have seen it pull off
> some miraculous saves - not that I would trust the drive any more, but
> it would allow you to get your data off the drive. Don't
> expect it to be really fast at the highest levels, however. You would
> need a PC to run it on - it is
> only looking at readability of the blocks, and is not  file system
> specific... so it should work with a
> mac disk too.... spinrite isn't real cheap ($90 or so) but it is well
> respected.

Caveat!  I made that mistake and I think that's mentioned in my
presentation.  Get the best image you can FIRST.  Don't use dd (which
dies at the first error) use dd-rescue or something else that will
continue on and work around the bad spots and maybe retry from different
directions.  Mine was a case where spinrite probably did more harm than
good (it was a hard crash and I think spinrite spread some of the
damage).  You can always run spinrite later, after you have as much data
as you can get.

Yeah this can all take a long time.  The drive in question that was the
subject of my presentation was a 200 Gig drive where track zero was
crashed and unrecoverable and bad spots scattered throughout the drive.
After two months of work, I had recovered all but 384K of data.

> You might also simply go buy another drive,  and do a quick install of
> the OS to test.  You are probably headed in that direction anyway
> (unless you have AppleCare), so you might as well make the plunge...

If you have hardware errors back from that drive like that, you can
never trust that drive again.

> -- Dave

Mike
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Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
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