Software to recover data from failing hard drive?

LABachlr · #1 December 24th, 2008, 06:14 PM

My friend has a black Macbook that is extremely slow. It takes about 10 min. to boot up (literally), and when it does finally boot up, the good ol' beach ball comes up whenever I click on anything to do anything.

I then tried hooking up to a new iMac as a target drive. I was able to read some of the hard drive, but the User folder was empty, so I could not retrieve any of the data. Also, trying to access the target drive and trying to eject it made the new iMac slow way down.

And the hard drive was making a faint chirping sound, and then it turned into a crunching sound (much like that of the old 4200RPM hard drives of years ago).

I tried resetting the PRAM and also reset the power management. I also did a Safe Boot...all to no avail.

The DVD burner does not work. So, I could not do a hardware test or an archive and install. However, since the hard drive is most likely failing, an archive and install would not help any.

So, I'm guessing that the hard drive is going since the hard drives in Macbooks have been known to fail (it happened to a daughter of a friend of mine).

Is there a software out there that will allow me to retrieve the data from the drive? Trying to avoid having to go to a data recovery place.

SGilbert · #2 December 24th, 2008, 07:19 PM

Data Rescue II & TechTool Pro will be able to salvage data IF they can. The former is by far better of the two.

SMARTReporter will tell you right away if your HD is going south.

Satcomer · #3 December 24th, 2008, 07:23 PM

Wow the User folder was empty? That is a tuff nut to crack. Have you took the the drive out and do the freezer trick (putting the drive in waterproof bog) and then taking it out quickly and putting in an external to see if you can mount it. This way you could try to use Migration Assistant to get the relevant data.

Merry Christmas.

LABachlr · #4 December 24th, 2008, 07:55 PM

Great. Thanks. I'll give those a shot.

Btw, do either of you know the outgoing mail settings for a .mac account?

I've googled it, but did not get a definite answer. I know it's smtp.mac.com (if it's not, let me know), but does it use SSL? What port number should I put? I have it set up for IMAP in Entourage '08. Thanks.

Satcomer · #5 December 24th, 2008, 08:49 PM

Well in my Me sever SMTP settings (in Apple's Mail) the ports used are 25, 465 & 587. The SSL username/password is used too. I think it is IMAP and the incoming server is mail.mac.com and is also uses SSL username/password.

LABachlr · #6 December 25th, 2008, 02:39 AM

Thanks. I found it.

Outgoing Mail Server: smtp.mac.com
Check: SMTP service requires secure conneciton (SSL)
Check: Override default SMTP port: 587
Check: SMTP Requires Authentication: Use same settings as receiving mail server

Cheers.

The Following User Says Thank You to SGilbert For This Useful Post:
LABachlr (December 24th, 2008)