Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Gossamer · Aug 29, 2006, 03:33 PM

So the 60gig HD in a friend's B&W G3 crashed...hung at spinning thingy on startup, the volume shows up grayed out when connected via firewire drive in Disk Utility, and refuses to mount. I tried Disk Warrior, but the drive managed to lock it up. I'm running Data Rescue II on it, and it's been going for the past 28 hours or so, moving along very slowly. The most important things on it are the irreplaceable photos. I've heard that iTMS purchases can be re-downloaded, so that's no longer a major concern, but it would still be nice to get them back. Is there some super secret recovery utility that's better, or do I just have to wait this out (it will take several more days at this rate...).
And before anyone says anything, a backup system has been configured and is ready as soon as the new hard drive is put in place.
Any help?

CatOne · Aug 29, 2006, 07:48 PM

It's going to take a LONG time. The table that tells where your files are on the hard disk is gone. So Data Rescue must manually scan every block and try to figure out what the situation is.

The only faster way is to go back in time and have a reasonable backup. Since you pooched on that, you can wait and cross your fingers. Better than a total loss I guess.

Waiting 48 hours for it to crunch away is faster than a round trip to Data Savers which is 3-10 days and thousands of dollars.

A good adage is "only back up stuff you can't afford to lose."

Gossamer · Aug 29, 2006, 10:51 PM

Alright, I figured that would be the answer...hopefully I can recover stuff. Thanks for the help!

Gossamer · Aug 31, 2006, 10:10 AM

Okay, a UPS went out this morning so I lost three days of progress in Data Rescue II, but I don't have a license code for it, so I'm trying DiskWarrior. Apparently, it can take days to move from the point it's at now, so I'll be a bit more patient this time.

iREZ · Aug 31, 2006, 12:46 PM

why not ask him instead?

http://forums.macnn.com/members/what_the_heck/

Gossamer · Aug 31, 2006, 09:05 PM

Originally Posted by iREZ

why not ask him instead?

http://forums.macnn.com/members/what_the_heck/

So DiskWarrior totally kicks Data Rescue II's butt. DRII had nothing to show after literally 72 hours of work, but DW was able to recover and fix the directory in about 8 hours. I'm making a backup of the drive right now and I'll get a new one to replace it, along with implementing my new backup system (rsync to my linux server, thanks besson3c).

Gossamer · Aug 31, 2006, 09:09 PM

Oh goodness...I just got back from my workplace, and what a fiasco. So Diskwarrior repair the directory and the drive mounted. First priority: backup all data. I go into disk utility and tell it to make a new image from disk, most of the way through I got an error, iphoto6.temp couldn't be read. Plus the disk is no longer mounting, and the volume name is now grayed out and says disk1s10 instead of the volume name....okay, back to DW. It rebuilds the directory and everything, then as it's verifying the data (last step before it's fixed...) I get a kernel panic. Oh yeah, this is the G5 with the bad RAM that randomly crashes.

So I moved everything over to my G4. The drive mounted okay, I tried just a simple drag and drop, but the same file (iphoto6.temp) gave me problems. I deleted that file, and I was able to drag and drop the user folder that I need to save. I'm backing that all up to a server before I try imaging the drive again. We'll see what happens. Thank goodness for Remote Desktop, so I can do this all from home.