A couple of weeks ago, mrspao’s laptop died much to the annoyance of mrspao as it was full of her photos and stuff. Most of which were backed up elsewhere – but some were not. Investigation revealed that there was a disk error, whether just filesystem corruption or something worse was unknown at the time as the laptop failed to boot.
After trying to boot in ‘target mode’ making the laptop an expensive firewire disk and mounting it on one of my Macs – revealed that something was seriously wrong as the filesystem failed to mount. A rummage round for the AppleCare CD for my laptop revealed a bootable CD that boots into TechTool – this at least recognised the disk and reckoned it could restore around 25% of the disk but not which bits of the disk. It also confirmed physical failure on the disk. So we abandoned that plan and kept it as a last resort.
At this point it was time for some serious Googling – this revealed that the tool for Mac disk maintenance is called Disk Warrior. So given the cost and balancing it against the worth of the data (priceless kitten pictures) we ordered a copy.
A day or so later it arrived, turns out that you get a bootable CD that boots a very limited version of OSX with customised disk drivers that bypasses the usual filesystem drivers and can read your disk directly, so we set the thing going. An hour or so later a report is generated confirming that there are physical errors on the disk, but also usefully providing a file browser so you can rummage round and see exactly what is available. In this case mrspao’s data was all accessible, so connecting an external USB drive which automounted and then copying the files off through the file browser (no not the Finder as this is not even running) mrspao’s data is all saved.
Phew, and I become a hero husband.
In addition to this Disk Warrior when installed on the native machine – defragments an HFS+ Journalled volume, fixes up permissions and broken plist files which on my own laptop has improved disk performance no end.
At the end of the day Disk Warrior is not a cheap bit of software but it did do exactly what it claimed to and has proven worth every penny. Overall I am fairly certain that it was more cost effective to purchase and do the work myself (of which there was not a lot) than sending the laptop off to a service centre. I cannot recommend Disk Warrior highly enough.
Chris | 14-Dec-09 at 11:40 pm | Permalink
Plus with a server center, you never know if they really gave it their all trying to get your data, or just told you it was toast. Good job!
Jeanne | 15-Dec-09 at 5:43 pm | Permalink
You are a hero. Which reminds me – it might be time for me to back up my data. Don’t want to lose all those cat pictures!