My HDD is damaged, and my Macbook can not start up. YIKES

[sashaiawm]

My HDD is damaged, and my Macbook can not start up. YIKES

Here is what I have to work with.

1. Newest version of Disk Warrior start up DVD
2. Snow Leapoard 10.6 install CD
3. USB external 1 TB drive with 500 GB free. (external USB HDD)

Here is what I have done.

Start up from Disk Warrior, ran diagnostics (8 hours) reports disk is damaged, I should save the preview copy it created onto an external USB HDD, and replace the internal HDD.

So I saved the Disk Warrior preview copy to the external USB HDD, this took 20 hours!

Now, what I thought all I had to do was start up from the preview copy on the external USB HDD.

Well, I moved it to my wife's iBook to look at the preview copy, and I see that only 18GB was transferred! What, 20 hours?? So I looked deeper into user folder and, I can't tell if its a permission problem or just that the the drive is so buggy nnothing got saved. well, see the attached screen shot. mc2 and mc1

So, back two steps, here is where I think we stand.

1. Get all my data off that bad drive before it gets worse! ( I can start my macbook up from my wife's computer as a firewire target external HDD and try to pull all the data off that way...)
2. Somehow use that copy of data to be a start up disk on my external hdd until I get home and can have the drive replaced.

What do you think the best approach is?

One last bit of info. I have about 500 GB of back ups on the external USB HDD that I would like not to erase.
My dead Macbook HDD has 420 GB of info to recover.
I can go buy a new external 500GB HDD if you think it is better to start with a fresh HDD.

Thank you for your help!

 

[djackmac]

Best thing to do is get the drive out of the machine. Put it in a dock/enclosure and slave the drive to you wifes machine. This is to keep the drive cool. By the way have a fan blwing on the drive also. Then get another drive with at least enough space to save all the data from that drive. Then get a copy of data rescue 3 and do a clone (not a recovery) of the failing drive to the destination drive. Instead of investing the money into data rescue 3, you could possibly try to use disk utility to do a restore from the bad drive to the destination drive but looks like the drive is too far gone for that. Data Rescue has a great cloning feature that I've used many times with many failed drives.

 

[sashaiawm]

thanks for that advice!
I'm curious about getting the drive out of the machine. when I boot from cd the macbook works, only the drive doesn't show, so I don't think the problem is with the other components of the computer.... Do you think its just as effective to use datarescue on the macbook w/o enclosure...

hmm, so when I get an enclosure, does it matter if it's got a usb or firewire connector?

How do I slave the drive to my wifes machine? With firewire or usb?


thanks again!

 

[djackmac]

thanks for that advice!
I'm curious about getting the drive out of the machine. when I boot from cd the macbook works, only the drive doesn't show, so I don't think the problem is with the other components of the computer.... Do you think its just as effective to use datarescue on the macbook w/o enclosure...

hmm, so when I get an enclosure, does it matter if it's got a usb or firewire connector?

How do I slave the drive to my wifes machine? With firewire or usb?

Sorry about the late reply. I don't hang out here much anymore.

As previously mentioned, the reason to get the drive out of the machine is not because of other components, but to keep the drive as cool as possible, hence the fan blowing on the drive when its out.

Once the drive is out of the machine you can use either firewire or usb.