I had a 120gig SATA Hard drive in my G5. It died. Dead blocks all over. My last full backup on the drive is from October 16th, 2003 (the day I got the G5). The only thing really on that drive that has changed since October 16th is email. My email was last backed up around November 3rd (when I got back from Japan). So I've lost around thirty thousand emails (five to six thousand+ are Unsanity related), all of my spam training, my recent filters, and the ilk. So now, I need to try to recover the data on the drive and need recommendations on how to do it. I will not be checking email until I have recovered what was lost. I've heard dd might be able to do it but I do not know exactly how I'd go about it. I've also heard that freezing a drive might make it work. I've had a lot of help trying to get my data back via different methods from macg.
Funny thing... about 20 or so minutes before the failure or any sign of failure I had just happened to email/contact Alsoft to ask them about a new version of DiskWarrior that would boot a G5. And I had been thinking about backups all day before the incident.
I have tried DiskWarrior, first by booting my AlBook from the DiskWarrior CD then booting my G5 into FireWire Target Disk Mode and attempting to repair the disk from there. Problem was the disk is so badly damaged (the partition map seems hosed, and the Finder and Disk Utility cannot seem to get the names of the first two partitions) that TDM wasn't "forwarding" the damaged drive. I was able to repair the working volumes though.
Does anyone know how I can use dd to copy the data that's still on the drive to another drive? Also, does anyone have experience with these FireWire connectors. What are the chances the bus powered versions will be able to power my drives (so I can do a restore if I can get dd to work.
Right before I noticed the horrible failure I saw some weird long entries in the console:
Dec 2 15:29:21 Stability-64 kernel: disk0s9: 0x3 (UNDEFINED).
Dec 2 15:50:24 Stability-64 kernel: disk0s9: 0x8 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s9 is Blasphemy. It also showed the same errors for disk0s10 (Sacrilege).
I tried running DiskWarrior locally. I let it run for about 16 hours. My log is full of the above errors and errors like this:
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 2 to 3
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 2 to 3
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 2 to 3
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 2 to 3
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 6106 to 6107
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 79239469 to 79239470
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 79239468 to 79239469
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 79239468 to 79239469
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 79239468 to 79239469
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 79239467 to 79239468
DiskWarrior App: Read I/O error for block range 79239467 to 79239468
So I thought I'd give Data Rescue a whirl. It would launch then take forever to show the main window with a list of drives. Possibly because every time OS X "pings" the drive there is a 3-10 minute pause until it realizes the drive cannot be read. After I finally got Data Rescue up, I chose the Blasphemy drive and click Thorough Scan. The 3-10 minutes elapsed and I am shown a window that says 0 files recovered and and error message that complains about no Allocation Block Layout file being found and it wants to know the allocation block information. Giving it the information is useless as it found nothing. Doing a thorough scan on a working drive takes about 30 minutes to an hour. The partition and media scans do about the same thing with regards to errors.
Scanning /dev/disk0: Maxtor 6Y120M0 Media (117246 MB).
HFS+ volume, Thorough scan.
Error #5 on logical block #736.
Error #5 on logical block #736.
Error #5 on logical block #736.
Drive 10 was just as useless. Taking forever to scan. Throwing errors in the console:
# ReadCDBlock: attempt to read 2048 bytes at offset 0 failed with an Input/output error
===> TTIOBundle ReadRawBlock err = -4, readfd = 17, blockNumber = 2, numBlocks = 1
Dec 2 15:28:42 Stability-64 kernel: disk0s9: 0x3 (UNDEFINED).
===> TTIOBundle DoMount /dev/disk0s9 err = 16
It did make a pretty report though.
Posted by rosyna at 04:08 PM
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To use dd to dump your drive to a file, assuming you have your broken drive as disk1, just type 'dd bs=50M if=/dev/disk1 of=/some/file/to/dump/the/disk/to.dd'. The params are if -> input file, of -> output file, bs = block size for copying. The file from this is relatively useless except as backup--you could copy it to the exact same drive model with dd (maybe another model of the same size if you're lucky), it think there may be some way to mount it using hdid. If you want to go directly from one drive to another without using an intermediate file, that works as expected: 'dd bs=50M if=/dev/disk1 of=/dev/disk2'.
It may be more useful to copy one partition at a time, if you can, using /dev/disk1s1 and friends as input. You should be able to load those partitions' data onto any other partition of the same size.
Posted by: vasi on December 2, 2003 4:47 PMRosyna, consider employing DriveSavers. (I am not affiliated in any way with them, nor have I ever used them. However, their client list is pretty impressive.)
Posted by: Mike Harris on December 2, 2003 5:28 PMRosyna,
Sorry to hear your drive bit the dust. My wife offered to purchase me a G5 Dual 2GHz for sport, but I turned her down after reading that model is having issues. I'm holding out for the PowerPC 980 chipsets anyway.
Posted by: CREB on December 2, 2003 6:07 PMI work at the University of Michigan's computer repair facility, we use WiebeTech's drive adapters. They work wonderfully and they are absolutely heavenly for troubleshooting dead drives/busses. However, if your hard drive is borked, the connector won't help you out. Yes it will power the drive, but unless it's your bus that's faulty your dead drive is going to stay dead.
Posted by: Phil Dokas on December 2, 2003 7:25 PMThe adapter thing was because the backup is on an IDE drive and I need some way to get it on the G5
Posted by: Rosyna on December 2, 2003 8:01 PMI would recommend Drivesavers (mentioned above) whom I am not affiliated with, or Tekserve (whom I work for).
At Tekserve you are looking around $1,000 (top of my head) if we recover data you need, no charge if we fail. Drivesavers is more expensive but they may be able to get it if we don't.
Posted by: Etan on December 2, 2003 8:53 PMdd if=/dev/disk0s9 of=$HOME/disk0s9.dmg bs=512 conv=noerror
That will copy the disk 512 bytes at a time (horrendously inefficient), ignoring errors — unreadable data will become all nulls (0x00). You can try varying the block size if you think you can get more data.
Posted by: Richard Soderberg on December 3, 2003 4:17 AMI had a similar problem with an external drive, and DiskWarrior for X couldn't have it. However, as a last resort, I booted into OS 9, used SilverLining to get the OS to recognise the drive existed, and then used Disk Warrior on 9. To my surprise, it did fix the drive, although it made some really nasty noises while doing it, and took about a half hour. I lost about one per cent of my files, but that's still better than all of them.
Posted by: Craig Grannell on December 3, 2003 5:36 AMI'm sorry to hear about your drives and can't offer any additional suggestions apart from what's been given already, but read xlr8yourmac.com's article for a possible? explanation...
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G5/G5_drive_heat_tips.html#storytop
Posted by: Alex on December 3, 2003 9:36 AMIn my past troubles with hard drives I've always gotten rid of the drive in question as there is a simple formula for computer hardware -- it either works or it doesn't. The good news it that Apple should be giving you a new drive. When I was deep into backing up I always preferred tape backup. For the the serious stuff I still prefer magneto optical. The commercial recovers such as the above mentioned Drivesavers and their kind do an excellent job of recovering. Most of the out-the-shelf MAC software will recover but I've never had one hundred percent salvage with any of them as they usually just scavenge bits and pieces.
Hard drive crashes suck. Christmas is coming!
Posted by: CREB on December 3, 2003 10:09 AMSometimes the mechanical part of the drive is bad, and sometimes the electronic part (the board) is bad. If it's the electronic part, sometimes you can replace the board with an identical one (which is sometimes very hard to find, because you have to match the exact version numbers that are printed on the boards) and then it will at least be able to read the drive and transfer data. You might try to clone the whole drive onto a working drive using Symantec Ghost or Carbon Copy Cloner, and then sort through the data and see if you can find the email stuff. Good luck! (I back up my entire hard drive every night onto one of 2 destinations, and I take one of those externals with me when I leave the house so that all of my data isn't in one place, in case of fire or theft.)
Posted by: Dan Starcher on December 5, 2003 7:05 AMI have an iMac and a Powerbook full of years of work including photo's, CD's, documents, mail, etc. I bought a Maxtor external HD 200G but I'm afraid to use it in fear I'll lose everything. Any advise on the best way to back up? I already lost some photo's and my iPhoto Liabrary by the HD not being removed properly. It is best to back up the entire computer or just parts? Help! Larry Rdymuscle@aol.com Additionally, any advise on storing digital photo's? Thanks.
Posted by: Larry on December 9, 2003 2:52 PMKeep comments on topic. If a comment is unrelated to this post, it may be removed or moderated.