binary_miracle Posted October 23, 2008 Share Posted October 23, 2008 Hello everyone, The other day my main HD up and died. I had suspected it was on its way out, but had postponed buying a new hard drive to back up with. Was planning to do it next week, but it seems it couldn't wait. It had been making a few strange sounds that sounded like extreme disk activity. It is a 500 GB sata Seagate drive. One day I went to unsleep my hackintosh and there was a very long beach ball. I put it back to sleep, awoke it once more, and the screen was full of a million different colored lines, and a spinning beach ball. I tried a hard reboot and it didn't even get to bios. Here is a description of what is happening with this hard drive: - It spins up and doesn't make any strange sounds as far as I can tell - It is not detected by bios at all - When it is plugged in bios does not detect any other (healthy) sata hard drives that may be connected - When it is plugged in upon booting the computer the screen remains black with a solid white (not blinking) underscore at the top left corner. This is before the bios. If I leave the computer alone for a few minutes, it eventually gets to the motherboard splash screen, and hangs there for about twice as long as the first black screen. It then proceeds to try to detect a boot disk and fails to do so (I will post the exact text later). - Because bios won't detect any hard drives if the faulty drive is connected, the only way I can take a better look at things is by booting into a kalyway install on an external USB hard disk (an ipod actually). There I was able to determine that: - Disk utility does not detect the drive at all - System profiler freezes if I try to request disk information - there is no rdisk present in /dev for the disk - Data Rescue II freezes when launched The disk contained a vanilla install of OS X and a great deal of important video footage and pictures, so I don't want to give up hope just yet of recovering any of it. My questions are these: 1. What type of hard disk failure do you think this is based on the information I've provided? Has anyone experienced anything like this? 2. Is there anything that can be done to salvage data from the disk, aside from bringing it to a professional? (It is not worth $1000+ to me to recover the data on the disk) Thanks in advance for any help or advice. ~ binary_miracle P.S. Yesterday I tried freezing it in my freezer for a few hours and then plugging it in. No luck. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
candykane Posted October 23, 2008 Share Posted October 23, 2008 sure get Data Rescue II - Mac demo from there site http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php try it find out if you could see your drive if so download this file SerialBox_10-2008__Serial_Seeker_and_iSerial_Reader @ the pirate site well you know what to do for the rest next time get a second drive and use time machine :censored2: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
binary_miracle Posted October 23, 2008 Author Share Posted October 23, 2008 Thanks candykane, but if you read my original post I've already mentioned that I've tried Data Rescue II without any luck. It freezes the program. I am most interested at this point in diagnosing exactly what went wrong with the hard drive, then going from there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
candykane Posted October 23, 2008 Share Posted October 23, 2008 Well your sorry i read the post but dit not see that. well one other comes to mind diskwarrior there are only a few other programs out there not many artical wil a list of 5 http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=693649 Under windows there are many programs maby its wiser to install windows and install macdrive http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/ good luck to you Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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