I chatted with Jason online this morning around 9.  I wanted to paste some of the stuff he told me, but I didn’t save the chat   In a nutshell, there was nothing more that he could do.  The files I sent him to take a look at upon further inspection by him revealed that there was nothing he could do to rebuild it.  Of course this wasn’t the news I wanted to hear, but I was very grateful has spent the time he did and at least made me feel I had tried most of the options that I could.  So overall my experience with Disk Warrior and their staff has been very positive.

In parting he did give me some other avenues to examine.  One was a physical data recovery company called DriveSavers.  This of course meant mucho dinero.  The other was to try another program called Data Rescue to see if I could just grab any data off the hard drive.  Data Rescue has great demo mode where they allow you to download the software program for free to scan your hard drive for data.   The limitation comes in when you want to transfer a recovered file larger than 5mb you have to buy and register the product.  I figured this was worth a shot.  This way at least I could try seeing if I could recover any data before shelling out another hundred dollars.  This was my last hope.

Install was fine and things started out smoothly.  The first thing I did was I attempted to do a “thorough scan” of the hard drive.  This is where it would go through the hard drive scanning files and data that could be collected…It was kind of cool how they gave you an estimated of how long it would take to finish.  Here’s the initial screenshot of the program as it ran:

Things were looking good!  At least it was scanning and reading the hard drive.  I wouldn’t mind waiting 33 hours if that meant I could recover some of my data.  Since things were working so far I decided to let it work its magic.  A little later when I checked back on the progress, I got a little shock.  The estimate had gone up a little.

Uh oh, from 33 hours to 1077 hours.  I read through some forum postings online and they said that this was natural as the program itself slows down as it hits bad sections of the hard drive.  Ok.  I can live with that.  So I let it go back to chugging away.  A few hours later I noticed that it had been stuck on one section for a long time and no longer was there a time estimate as to how much longer I would have to wait.It sat there for hours upon hours.  I was praying it was still doing its secret voodoo hard drive magic, but apparently, hard drive block “81822720″ was too erroneous for the program.  After much internal debate I decided to throw in the towel and stope the program.  I tried stopping it through the program itself by clicking “stop”.  However, it wouldn’t quit.  So I had no choice but to force quit.  I did notice as I was trying to scan that if you stop early you can choose to recover the files that it had processed so far.  I didn’t realized what that meant, but later I would come back to this observation.

I was running out of options.  Apple Disk Utility, Disk Warrior, and Data Rescue II had all failed me.  I decided I had better start getting comfortable with the fact that my data was gone.  I decided just for shits and giggles I would contact the guys at drive savers.  Just to see if they were cheaper than the other drive recovery company I had contacted when this disaster first struck.

On the phone I talked with a jolly fellow named Ryan.  He was very friendly and professional.  He sounded a lot more knowledgable than the woman I spoke with at the OC Drive Recovery Company (I don’t remember their exact name).  At least he asked me more questions.  They have an interesting policy where if you send in the drive and they can’t get any data off of it then you don’t have to pay them anything.  But if they do recover data than you have to pay anywhere from $1400 – $1800.  He sent me a quote of some of their services and I’ve attached a portion of it underneath.

Once again this was too rich for my blood.  So I thanked him and went off on my merry no data way.  Later as I was pondering my crappy no data existence I finally had an intelligent thought.  Why don’t I try Data Rescue again, but then stop it before it gets to the point where it hangs?  This way, even if I don’t scan the whole drive, I’ll be able to recover some files rather than none.  It made a lot of sense to me so I sprung into action.  One little snag, however, I had unplugged the hard drive from the dock I was using and when I plugged it back in none of the data recover disk fixer programs recognized it.  It was like it didn’t exist.  I think it was Ryan from Disk Savers was saying that normally when hard drives physically fail they get worse the more you use them.  This was not cool since I had just had my stroke of brilliance.  I kept docking and undocking the drive hoping that it would finally show up.  After 10 minutes of attempts (and even pointing a fan at it) it finally recognized the drive.

I proceeded as how I had thought of doing it.  Actually,  I had to run out to a meeting so I had my mom help in my absence.  She  put a piece of tape on the progress bar to indicate when she should click stop.  Luckily, I had the screen shots from before to compare and give us an idea of when things start going bad.  When I got back from my meeting things were still processing.  The following day I opened the folder with the rescued documents.  What I was expecting was a lot different than what I saw.  Instead of files with the file names I had named them with.  Everything was organized by file type.  Rescue Data must organize the files according to the file names it knows (like office excel, html, powerpoint, etc…), but I wasn’t quite sure what it does with other application extensions.

So the good news is that I was able to recover some files off the bad disk, but the bad news is that I have no clue what they or their original application extensions (for the files that Data Rescue didn’t understand).  At least for the document files like word and excel I can go through them and rename them (which will take some time), but for the Apple programs like Pages, Keynote, or Omni Outliner, I’m not if any those files are around anymore.  But hey better to get something than nothing right?

The timing was pretty good, because a few days later I tried scanning the drive again, but it wouldn’t work no matter what I tried.  The drive was pretty fried.  The moral and lessons of this story are:

1. Hard drive data recovery is a lucrative business
2. There are good programs out there that can help you recover files
3. Don’t give up too fast
4. I’m an idiot for not backing up when I should have

Hopefully, this doesn’t happen to you.  I know I’ve learned my lesson.  Maybe in a future post I’ll write about my new backup setup I have now.  What’s the saying about mistakes?  Is it “Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.”

**** UPDATE 3/5/2010 ****

It’s been well over a year since my failed Macbook hard drive debacle.   It was a really crappy experience to go through, but at least I learned my lesson (again) to always back up.  However, besides the lesson I learned I do feel somewhat vindicated (or at least happier) by the fact that well over 3 years Apple has finally admitted that there was something wrong on their part that was causing hard drives to crash like no tomorrow.  Officially this is what Apple has fessed up to…

Apple has determined that a very small percentage of hard drives that were used in MacBook systems, sold between approximately May 2006 and December 2007, may fail under certain conditions.

If your MacBook was purchased in the date range listed above and shows a flashing question mark on the screen, please take it to Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider and they will examine the hard drive to confirm if it is eligible for a replacement, free of charge, under this program.

As chance would have it my Macbook fell under that “small percentage of hard drives” that failed.  Lucky me.  Anyway, even though it’s a year late and many dollars short I found my broken hard drive (luckily I didn’t throw it away) and had it replaced.  So while all the data I lost is still gone at least I have a new hard drive.  I’m thinking I’m going to turn it into an external hard drive.   Guess it’s better than nothing.  I slightly tip my hat to you Apple…but only slightly.

Read the full Apple announcement

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torx screwdriver needed for macbook hd caddy

Yesterday I left off where I had just bought a new hard drive and an enclosure for the old hard drive (to see if I could salvage any of the old data).  I was able to get the new hard drive working in the computer, which confirmed that the hard drive was the problem.  As an FYI to anyone replacing a Macbook hard drive the hard drive caddy uses a Torx T-8 screw driver.  I found this out AFTER I got home after buying the hard drive I realized I couldn’t put it in until I bought one of these suckers.  At first I didn’t even know the name of the pattern, but now I know any star-shaped pattern on a screw is known as “Torx.”  Once again google came to the rescue.  I called Radio Shack to see if they sold it, but the guy on the phone said “no,”  though he sounded confused when I asked (probably because he didn’t know) … So I went to Home Depot and bought a Torx precision kit for 5 bucks.

Installing the hard drive was straightforward.  I have to give Apple credit for making the swap easy (however, I don’t know if the Torx choice was a good choice).  Anyway, after getting the drive and new OS installed I turned my attention to trying to get the data off the old drive.

HD Dock

I hooked up my old drive to a Thermaltake Black Widow hard drive dock I bought from Best Buy.  It’s pretty handy for plugging in hard drives without the hassle and fuss of a regular enclosure where you have to unscrew and screw things back together.  With this dock you just plug it in like you would an iPod.  I plugged it in and fired up the only disk utility I knew of, Disk Utility.  When I first plugged in the hard drive I got an error message which said the drive isn’t readable (not a good sign).  But, luckily, when I ran Disk Utility the drive showed up.  I clicked the repair disk option and it started doing it’s repair magic.  While it was doing this it was making some god afwul noises–clicking, screetching, beeping.  Good sign, right??  Unfortunately, things went downhill from there…I got an error message which said it couldn’t fix it.  Hmmm…what to do now?

Disk Utility...How could you fail me??

Back to google.  Since things weren’t looking good I decided to look into data recovery companies.  I have heard these companies were expensive, but I wasn’t sure how much exactly.  I looked for a Southern California based company and found one called OC Data Recovery.  According to their website they’ve been in the business since 1999, which means they got to be good…  I called them to just get an idea of prices.  Turns out the minium price is anywhere from $1000 to $1500, but could be even more depending on how severe the problem.  I don’t have that kind of money so I politely declined.  Back to the drawing board.

I then decided to look into other programs that can do data recovery and that’s when I came across a software program called Disk Warrior.   I read their reviews on Amazon and Macworld and it was really positive.  Macworld’s conclusion “Time-honored disk maintenance and repair tool stays essential.”  I decided to give them a try.  I went to their website and purchased the software for a hundred bucks.  I figured it was worth a shot since I was running out of other doors to try.  The purchase, download, and install were straight forward.  The moment of truth had arrive…woudn’t it be able to fix my ailing hard drive.  I ran the program and it looked like it was running, but midway this showed up:

Nuts!  Things were looking hopeless.  On a whim I sent them an email yesterday like the error message told me to do.  This morning when I checked my email I didn’t get a reply.  I decided to call them instead.  I got a voicemail box and left a voice message thinking it was a lost cause.  To my surprise the called me a few hours later.  Jason actually called me and told me to do some extra things… like send him my console and system logs, put in some extra secret codes they have installed in the program, etc..  He started helping me through iChat and we left off with him saying that he might need to rebuild the journal for the hard drive by hand since the Apple Disk Utility might have screwed it up.  I’m not a hundred percent sure what that means, but it means some glimmer of hope.  We’re going to reconnect tomorrow and see if it can work.  My fingers are crossed.

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After it didn’t boot up I started to get worried.  One I had a feeling that my hard drive might be the problem, and two, I hadn’t backed up my data recently.  Then in my mind I was getting pissed at myself because just last month I had bought an external hard drive with the purpose of backing up all my data.  Then even more pissed because I had made a mental note to back up data on my “this week’s to do” list.  But in the midst of all my piss-offtness I figured it would be more productive to figure out what is wrong and see if I could get my computer working again.

This is actually the second time something like this has happened to a Mac product of mine.  My previous mac, a Powerbook g4 15in, had a hard drive failure (which I haven’t replaced) where when I would turn it on it would go to the Apple logo in the beginning and the underneath it would be this swirly thing indicating that things are loading.  However, it would just hang there indefinitely.  At the time that it happened I gave up on trying to fix it and instead bought a used MacBook that I have now.   I needed to upgrade anyway.

Fast forward to right now.  So I knew something might be wrong with the hard drive so I started researching.   Luckily, I had my dad’s computer handy. The two potential culprits I came across were a heat sink problem that caused MacBooks to shut down randomly and the boot up issue I had previously with my Powerbook.   If you just google “MacBook won’t boot”  you’ll get all kinds of results about al the problems MacBooks have.  However, I couldn’t find my exact problem.  So then I googled “Macbook won’t boot no logo”.  I had to sift through some stuff, but eventually came across a forum posting describing the exact problem I was having.  One way someone had suggested testing the problem was to remove the hard drive and see if it boots with a “blinking folder” icon.  If it shows that when the hard drive is out then it probably means the hard drive is broken.  The guy who initially posted the problem said he tried it and the folder showed up and when he replaced the computer with a new hard drive it worked again.  I took out the hard drive (following the pdf directions I found here) and booted it up again, and sure enough that blinking folder came up on my screen.  Hard drive is busted.

Today I bought a new hard drive and I’m seeing if I can get my computer working again…keep you posted…

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