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6 CommentsSo, I'm sitting on the lounge with my old PowerBook last night organising my TV shows in iTunes when I get a kernel panic screen and have to reboot. So I do, except...
It doesn't. The laptop gets to the grey boot screen and then starts flashing a folder with a question mark on it at me. So I check the internet and re-set my PRAM (or whatever it's called) and boot up from my Leopard Install CD.
Still no dice; Disk Utility doesn't recognise that the HDD has an OS on it, so it won't Repair. And to make everything really sweet the drive is making those horrible clunk-clunk noises associated with corrupt sectors.
To make matters even better, I don't have a recent backup.
So, oh wise 9rules, I was wondering if anyone has any advice on how I can recover my precious data. We have two other computers in the house but they're both PCs.
My whole life was in that laptop; emails, novels, art, websites... Any help/advice is much appreciated.
Mike
Written Feb. 10, 2008 / Report /
Oh man, only advice I have is try to hook up to another Mac (friend's Mac?) via Firewire and see if you can get your Powerbook to boot up in target disk mode and see if you can salvage anything.
And if you don't have any Macs nearby, perhaps call your local Apple Store and see if you could bring it there and they could try to do a transfer on a store machine and perhaps burn you a DVD.
skydiver
Written Feb. 18, 2008 / Report /
Try hooking it up to an (ugh) PC and running Spinrite from GRC.com. I hear they have great success at fixing unreadable drives.
Diskwarrior for the Mac might be able to get it to read, too.
alisdee
Written Feb. 18, 2008 / Report /
Thanks Mike and skydiver!
In the end, I took it to our local Apple reseller and pleaded with them for data recovery (estimated quote: $400 plus new disk). Five days later I get a call saying they've booted it up and the thing is working fine. So I race it home (they didn't charge me for the 'service'; huzzah) and promptly Time Machine it onto the external HDD my husband got me for V-Day.
Things are a-okay until Sunday midday when the drive dies again.
So this time my husband finally caved and I'm now the proud owner of a replacement (and mad props to Apple for the ease of TM recovery).
So the story has a happy ending.
(And I have one extra laptop, minus hard drive, to get rid of somehow...)
Johnny
Written Mar. 5, 2008 / Report /
Great news Alisdee! Good luck with the new machine :-)
PIXELjockey
Written Mar. 6, 2008 / Report /
I had a similar thing happen to me a while back. I was able to boot the computer as a external fire wire drive and pull off all my data. I then had to send it to Apple to get it working again, but at least I was not charged for the data recovery.
Mike
Written Mar. 6, 2008 / Report /
Nice! Great luck!