Normally, in order to recover your hard drive it has to be able to spin up and respond, in other words, Disk Drill, being a do-it-yourself software, will help you recover your data if the disk is still physically healthy. If there's a controller glitch, or power can no longer make your disk alive, you might consider special recovery services.
Though, as long as your hard drive can be mounted into Mac OS, even with physical damage on the drive, Disk Drill will cure it!
Depending on the seriousness of the disaster, you might be able to see some files and folders on your hard drive, or the disk may be considered not partitioned, formatted, corrupted, etc. In this case the surest scenario would be to select Deep Scan and recover your hard drive data by signatures.
How to...
I recommend using Disk Drill, it's free. I tried it once to recover some photos I lost and it worked.
Amer Sweidan
Runs on any PPC
or Intel Mac with Mac OS X 10.5+ |
|
How to recover data from your hard drive
#1
Download and install Disk Drill
So you downloaded your copy of Disk Drill Hard Drive Recovery software, and deployed it to your Applications menu. On the first launch you will need to install the new driver, which is required for correct hard drive recovery. Input your administrator password. After that you are ready to go!
#2
Connect the hard disk
Start the hard drive recovery software in Recovery mode. For that select "Recover" option in the first welcome screen. We presume the hard disk you need to recover data from is already connected to your Mac: an internal disk, or external USB drive.
#3
Choose your disk in the list
When you go on in Recovery Mode, you will be presented with the list of disks visible to Disk Drill. Select the disk or partition to recover data from. Depending on which disk exactly is now selected, which file system it has, if it is formatted at all or not, you will see the number of hard drive recovery tools in the list below.
If you highlighted the disk with no formatting your only option would be Deep Scan (you can still use it even on a normally partitioned disk). In any way if you highlighted the whole disk and not one of its partitions, Disk Drill will analyze the whole disk as one entity with raw file system, meaning it'll analyze every bit of it in a binary mode.
#4
Select scanning method
As discussed in the previous step, you can either go on with Deep Scanning, which might take time; but in most cases it will be your only hard drive recovery option (depending on how bad your hard disk feels). If you are able to select a partition to scan, if you surely know that the data you are searching for is there, you will be able to use Recovery Vault if this partition was previously protected, or Quick Scan if it's a FAT or NTFS data partition.
#5
Wait...
Depending on the scanning method you selected you will need to wait from 1 minute to many many more, if you had to use Deep Scan to recover hard disk of yours. The scanning speed may also be slower if it is an external hard drive recovery. Since Disk Drill reads every bit of the hard drive, scanning might be long, but hopefully effective.
#6
Have you used Recovery Vault?
As you know, Disk Drill has a unique feature: Recovery Vault. It is extremely important as there's no Quick Scan for Mac file system. Lucky you are if our hard drive recovery software locates Recovery Vault database on a dead disk it's recovering, it will offer you to switch to hard drive recovery from the Vault. This will greatly speed the process up and will increase the recovery chances in times.
#7
Select hard drive data to recover
Once the scanning is complete, you will see the list of found files. Select the ones you would like to recover. You can use Preview feature to find the files you were looking for. Make sure the recovery destination is outside of the hard drive you are trying to recover... and hit the "Recover" button. This may also take some time. Wait until all the recovered files are copied to the new media. Some times these files can still be corrupt. This means that another application may have overwritten a block of bits and the whole file structure is lost. Unfortunately there's no way to prevent this. Data recovery is about chances and good luck!
#8
Deep Scan is about file signatures
When reading raw data from a hard drive Disk Drill doesn't care if it's FAT, NTFS, whatever. That's why it is at the same time quite difficult to determine where files start and end, since everything looks like a series of bits to our hard drive recovery software. This is exactly where Disk Drill starts to apply its knowledge of file signatures. And it has quite a few! Once the known signature is found, it's an easy work to retrieve the things like .jpg, .doc or .xls, etc. If you go to Disk Drill's Preferences, you will see the list of known signatures. The ones that are selectable are those which can be recovered when found on dead disks.