Need help recovering partition from failing hard drive
Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2012 9:07 pm
Hey all,
I am helping a friend recover data off of her dying Mac drive, and things have gone sort of haywire. I first checked her HFS+ drive in Linux Mint, and the Disk Utility has confirmed that the drive has bad sectors, hence why recovering it using the Mac Finder won't help. The Finder errors out at the first sign of I/O, and with a lot of data to recover, it would be very tedious to begin a transfer after hitting a bad file.
I tried using a Live Linux CD on a Windows machine, and hooked up the problem drive to it via USB. I began to run the ddrescue program, so that I could copy the files from the drive to the Windows machine. Unfortunately, since I'm not very good in the command line, I accidentally reversed the locations, so the ddrescue began to copy the Windows machine to the Mac drive!
Thus, I'm at a loss. The drive will still mount, and I can access it, but now the Mac partition is gone, and I'm worse for the wear.
Should I try to use ddrescue on the drive again, copying everything to an empty drive, and then attempt to recover the deleted Mac partition that way? Or is there a good partition recovery utility that I should use to recover the partition first, and then pull off the data?
I am helping a friend recover data off of her dying Mac drive, and things have gone sort of haywire. I first checked her HFS+ drive in Linux Mint, and the Disk Utility has confirmed that the drive has bad sectors, hence why recovering it using the Mac Finder won't help. The Finder errors out at the first sign of I/O, and with a lot of data to recover, it would be very tedious to begin a transfer after hitting a bad file.
I tried using a Live Linux CD on a Windows machine, and hooked up the problem drive to it via USB. I began to run the ddrescue program, so that I could copy the files from the drive to the Windows machine. Unfortunately, since I'm not very good in the command line, I accidentally reversed the locations, so the ddrescue began to copy the Windows machine to the Mac drive!
Thus, I'm at a loss. The drive will still mount, and I can access it, but now the Mac partition is gone, and I'm worse for the wear.
Should I try to use ddrescue on the drive again, copying everything to an empty drive, and then attempt to recover the deleted Mac partition that way? Or is there a good partition recovery utility that I should use to recover the partition first, and then pull off the data?