Recover Files from Corrupted Hard Drive? Need help ASAP

Firstly to answer your question, it completely depends on the mechanism of failure. If you want to recover 1 or 2 documents you might be able to buy enough time by freezing the drive. I have done it before to recover a sim on a failed Linux box.
However, before you do that, I think you have a few bad sectors that have failed causing the OS not to boot. Easiest way is to boot a live disk and copy some files to a thumbdrive. You can use 1 of thousands, but personally I like Knoppix. Download the knoppix live DVD and burn the *.iso. Then boot to that and try to mount the drive in Linux. You might then be able to just drag and drop files onto your thumbdrive.

If that doesn't work, then you can try to run some f-disk program to repair it.

You do have a real other problem though. 3 drives in 6 months, means the drives themselves are more than likely not the problem. Could be a problem with your internal power supplies or could just be that you use it on a bus or something with lots of vibrations? Either way, I highly recommend a SSD (solid state drive).

As much as I hate Apple, I hate it more when people lose files. It just sucks. I used to recover files from people's broken hard drives all the time. And I used to have CarPC's, running full PC's in a vehicle, so bad hard drive sectors were a common problem. We used Compact Flash drives in an IDE adapters for a while before SSD's became more common.

 

Yeah, that's very unusual to go thru drives that quickly.

I've had desktop (3.5") drives of all brands fail or develop bad sectors (but never that many in even a 2 year time span) but I haven't had that many laptops so I've never had any failed laptop drives yet.

Agree on the SSD recommendation (for a quality SSD, not random crap from lower tier drive makers like OCZ) for vibration and shock resistance.

Is the laptop being banged around while turned on? Is it being dropped or subjected to a lot of shock?

 

Fan failure leading to over heating?

Bob Wilson

 

Of the drive? I haven't usually seen much in terms of cooling for laptop drives, if any. I replaced a failing hard drive on a friend's MacBook Pro 13" Unibody Early 2011 Repair - iFixit over the weekend and I observed nothing to help cool the drive.

I've replaced the drives on my Lenovo T61p and X100e w/SSDs (the hard drives still worked fine) and didn't notice anything to help cool the drives. Have opened up others to put in RAM or try to fix things before.

 

Our PowerBook G4 and MacBook both have fans.

Bob Wilson

 

^^^
Right, I know they have fans but they're in another area and seem more to cool the CPU and GPU (if equipped).

It's hard to tell but if one browses around thru MacBook Pro 13" Unibody Early 2011 Repair - iFixit, you'll notice the hard drive is in the front corner next to the trackpad. The fan is at the the back, near the display hinges. There were no air intakes on the bottom cover/lid.

 

Well our Macs are getting a little long on the tooth:

• PowerBook G4 - 1 GHz, 133 MHz bus, 1 GB memory, AirPort 802.11 b
• MacBook - 1.8 GHz, 667 MHz bus, 2 GB memory, 802.11 a/b/g/n

Curious, the PowerBook G4 AirPort can see the WiFi network but won't accept the password. This suggests layer 1/2 are OK but the WiFi password recognition (WEP? WPA? WPA2?) is broken. With no option on the PowerBook, I'll have to open up the T-Mobil hotspot but I'm not thrilled about going to WEP or OPEN.

Bob Wilson

 

Cooling hard drives is not common. And unless you are in a server environment where the disk is seeing heavy extreme usage, not necessary.

Hard drives usually run between 5C and 55C with no problems. They can run hotter and colder with problems. This is for standard platter based drives. SSDs are usually 0C to 70C range, but because they are flash memory, high heat write cycles greatly reduce available life. For instance a block of flash memory written at room temperature can withstand tens of millions of writes on average with a good process. Take that up to 85C, and you are now in the thousands. Take it up to 125C and if it even works, you are in the tens to hundreds of writes before that block is completely useless. Heat kills.