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Anand · Mar 18, 2011, 08:13 PM

The HD on my wife's Macbook just died. At the same time her backup drive died. These were both less than 3 months old as her original HD died about 3 months ago. When that drive died, I bought two drives, installed one and used one as a backup. Today, they both died.

3 drives in 3 months seems crazy - as does two drives dying on the same day.

Could there be something killing the drives? Anybody have any ideas?

seanc · Mar 18, 2011, 09:05 PM

What drives are these 3? What is the failure mode?

reader50 · Mar 18, 2011, 09:28 PM

Are you using a spike-protection power strip? If both were plugged in and you got a spike, it could blow both.

note: the external drive may be fine, try moving it to a new enclosure.

Anand · Mar 20, 2011, 11:30 AM

Actually, we did not use a power-supply at all. She just plugged the laptop charger into the wall. Wife also mentioned that the light on the charger no longer comes on. Would a powersurge fry the HD and the USB hard drive?

seanc · Mar 20, 2011, 12:19 PM

So she has a hard drive powered by the USB bus?

What happens if she tries it on a different computer?
Sounds like something killed the 5v line.

Anand · Mar 20, 2011, 06:42 PM

Yup, a USB powered 500gb drive used just as a backup. I finally go her computer to boot off the Snow Leopard DVD. Says the drive has invalid node structures and wont mount. I wonder if these problems existed and were actually backup on her USB HD (backuped in time machine). That is why both drives appear dead. Is there anyway to fix this?

Disc utility sees the drive but it wont mount. Should I try something else?

seanc · Mar 20, 2011, 06:47 PM

Disk Warrior.

What other computers do you have?

Anand · Mar 20, 2011, 07:22 PM

I have a Macbook Pro (older core duo) and I am trying to recover some files with Data Rescue II. I will look into discwarrior.

OreoCookie · Mar 21, 2011, 03:54 AM

Try Data Rescue before you try Disk Warrior. Data Rescue just reads off damaged drives (it can't make things worse), but Disk Warrior writes onto damaged disks. In my experience, Data Rescue does a much better job dealing with damaged drives.

Waragainstsleep · Mar 21, 2011, 05:19 AM

Disk Warrior can usually fix invalid node structures though. It sounds more like a corrupt hard drive than a physically damaged one.

Anand · Mar 21, 2011, 08:00 AM

Yes, there is no clicking sound coming from the internal macbook HD. I have had HD (at work) fail and click. These never showed up in disk Utility. This drive does. Going the try DiskWarrior today, see if I can get something saved. Thanks everyone for your help!

OreoCookie · Mar 21, 2011, 11:03 AM

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep

Disk Warrior can usually fix invalid node structures though. It sounds more like a corrupt hard drive than a physically damaged one.

The only time I was unable to recover something with Data Rescue was after I've used Disk Warrior to try and recover data. It screwed up the directory structure, the files were still there, but the file names were gone.

Waragainstsleep · Mar 21, 2011, 12:19 PM

I never had any directory problems with DW. Having said that, I haven't used it in a long time. I know it can do harm if you use the wrong version but otherwise I've never seen it cause a problem.

I usually start with Disk Utility, then go to DW.

Doc HM · Mar 22, 2011, 03:33 AM

Originally Posted by OreoCookie

Try Data Rescue before you try Disk Warrior. Data Rescue just reads off damaged drives (it can't make things worse), but Disk Warrior writes onto damaged disks. In my experience, Data Rescue does a much better job dealing with damaged drives.

Do the opposite of this.

Disk Warrior can fix invalid node issues just fine. It also doesn't write to the disk until it's sure it can. If the drive has mechanical issues DW will report these as it scans. If it can't repair the drive structure it will create a temporary directory on your boot drive to allow you to copy important data off. It isn't a full fledged data recovery app bt it still uses the "do no harm" to your data principle.

Data Rescue is also great, BUT, if your directory is hosed it will recover data but no file names. It's also hard to get the settings right without experience.

I would fire up DW first every time.