My wife has a 7-year old iMac, the cute one that looks like a lamp, and its hard drive finally went south.

As the drive was dying - it would make a quiet whir whir whir whir sound, then do the spinning beach ball and slowly access data - I made several copies of her last week's work - to a DVD and to an external firewire drive. Then we took the iMac to a repair shop and had them replace the drive and test it, and it is functioning well. We are keeping it in Tiger, for now.

I had made a complete clone of her working hard drive a week before the crash, so we are only talking about one weeks' work being lost.

But there are several copies of her most recent work, some on a DVD I burned while the drive was dying, and several finder copies onto external firewire drives.

Amazingly, this data on the external firewire drives is so corrupt that it has the power to render unmountable any drive it is put on. I have never heard of this.

I have three separate external firewire drives for her, some of them with three partitions. Whatever partition this data was put on, becomes unusable. Disk Utility can't fix it, DiskWarrior can't fix it - gives a message saying the directory is too damaged to replace.

Data Rescue can see the drive, and do its thing to retrieve data, so eventually I may be able to get her most recent work.

Whatever happened to that data, when the external firewire drives are trying to access it, they go thump thump. They make an audible sound.

These are OWC mini stacks, with known good hard drives in them, that function perfectly. It is only the partitions that have the corrupt data on them that refuse to mount and have unfixable b-tree errors.

I have never heard of this, did not even know it was possible.

if this was windows, I would say "virus"

However, with OS X, I am not sure virus is the right term here. Please let us know what you find out. Good luck trying to recover the data.

[www.youtube.com]

Sounds like a job for DiskWarrior

DiskWarrior - AMAZINGLY - throws up its hands in despair. In its polite way, it says, dude, this drive is so screwed you should just shoot it and put it out of its misery.

Monty Python has destroyed my wife's hard drive!

I get it now.

Try mounting the drives and deleting the problem-files while booted from OS 9 and then run DW on the drives again.

Thanks for the tip about OS 9. But actually, the problem files are the only thing that is needed -- they are the stuff she was working on when her hard drive crashed - her Apple Mail folder, her Address book, her web site, and some Word documents.

It is OK to wipe and reformat the drives - just totally wipe them, and start over, because there are multiple redundant clones of her drive, every week going back two months. On three separate externals.

She is now in the process of recreating her last week of work. 5 hours or so, so far.

Fortunately, against her will, I set up her domain to mirror her incoming email to a gmail account. So all her received mail is there. She is just missing her sent mail, which is not retained on her server.

Until now, she has treated this whole back up your drive stuff with amused scorn!

What is this thing called OS 9? Tarzan not understand

> actually, the problem files are the only thing that is needed

Believe it or not, but OS 9 could be good for that, too. Assuming that it has no trouble with the drives, burn the "bad" files to an ISO9660 CD while booted from OS 9 and see if they are readable under OS X from the CD.

will try this tomorrow, and report:
"Believe it or not, but OS 9 could be good for that, too. Assuming that it has no trouble with the drives, burn the "bad" files to an ISO9660 CD while booted from OS 9 and see if they are readable under OS X from the CD."



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/18/2007 05:00AM by roshi.

I thought for sure this was a Smurf thread

If you can mount the drive in OS 9, try copying the files one-by one, or a few at a time.

I once had Disk Warrior throw up its hands in despair at an OS 9 drive that had gotten so trashed that even open folders only displayed part of their contents. I was able to retrieve half of the files by copying them a few at a time from the finder. Most of the remaining I could copy by searching with Sherlock and then copying over before they vanished out of the Sherlock window. I only lost about 5% of the files (wouldn't copy over because of disk errors). The 95% I recovered were fine and caused no problems.