If you no longer see your familiar volumes in Finder, and newly existing ones appear to be empty or cleared, you might have lost your partitions. There's a number of reasons why this may happen and partition recovery is required. While this may lead to the complete data erasure, if you act fast your valuable information may still be recovered.
If partitions can not be accessed, Disk Drill should scan your whole drive using Deep Scan method. While you won't be able to recover your partitions exactly as they were, you may still get your valuable data back.
How to...
“Ok been trying to break this but can’t… It just does what it says on the tin… It’s an app that I will keep at hand for all the Macs at home… Not only well prepared but with a GUI that looks good. Easy to use for both beginners as well as more the technical users.”
Rick Lee
Runs on any PPC
or Intel Mac with Mac OS X 10.5+ |
|
Disk Drill: partition recovery software for Mac
#1
Install and launch Disk Drill
Once you download Mac Data Recovery software by CleverFiles, you can add it to the dock right from your Applications menu. This will let you launch our partition recovery software quickly whenever you need to recover your data or change Recovery Vault settings. Mount your external drive (USB drive, smart card, etc) and get ready to scan it with Disk Drill to recover partitions data.
#2
Start in recovery mode
To start your lost partition recovery from reformatted drive or data excavation from lost partitions you need to select Recovery mode in Disk Drill. Once you launch it, you will see 2 options: Protect and Recover. Select "Recover" to proceed with disk partition recovery of data from Apple Mac drives or other media.
#3
Select the disk to recover lost data
Once you go on in Recovery Mode you will be shown the list of available disks. Most probably the disk you are going to recover your data from will be totally unpartitioned, you will see this when you click and select this disk in Disk Drill. In this way you just select the whole disk you are going to do partition recovery from. It expands, don't make any internal disk selections now. You will see "Disk selected" label appearing if you did the selection of the whole disk. That's OK for hard drive partition recovery for now.
#4
Alternatively: select not partitioned space
Some times you will want to recover data only in not partitioned disk space. This may happen when not all partitions are lost or were erroneously formatted. First, click and select the disk as you did in step #3. Then click and select the newly appeared not partitioned space in this disk. This means that Disk Drill will only scan and search for lost data in disk space which is not partitioned. Most probably the actual data is still there untouched and recoverable, but that depends on many factors.
#5
Click "Deep Scan" and give it some time
Make sure you selected the whole disk or unpartitioned space. Now click Deep Scan. Other partition recovery methods are not available for this mode of data recovery. Deep scanning may take some time. Wait until it completes. Deep scan analyzes your disk bit by bit and finds lost files if they were not overwritten by other data and were not fragmented.
#6
Review & recover found data
Everything Disk Drill finds after scanning will be displayed in the resulting dialog. You can preview, then select and recover the files which you were looking for. In case of deep scanning the original file names are most probably lost, so you might need to go through the whole list of found items to locate the ones you needed. Now select the destination folder and click "Recover" to complete partition recovery.
#7
Prevent partition loss with Recovery Vault
If you enable Recovery Vault protection for your regular partitions in Disk Drill, your files will be recovered much faster and with much higher accuracy. Even if you need to recover partition on your hard drive, Recovery Vault database will be found during deep scan and you will be able to recover your files using our award-winning unique partition recovery software.