01-08-2012, 04:49 PM

Hi all new to this so please be patient. Turned on my mac and got s grey screen. Followed various instructions and have tried to repair using disk but it is telling me that I have an invalid sibling link. I have loads of important photos on this of my new born son is there anyway I get the hard drive working? I cannot mount the hard drive whatever that means even if I could back up the files I would be happy

01-08-2012, 08:35 PM

I assume you have no backups? The error you received is usually fatal which means your hard drive is inaccessible. I'm not sure that data recovery software will even work but you can give it a try.

Download a trial copy of Data Rescue 3 from here. You'll have to run the trial from either another machine or disk.

01-09-2012, 04:17 AM

Thanks for that. No back ups I'm afraid. When I first start disk utility it shows the disk space as being taken up so the files etc are still on the hard drive. How would I download the operating system onto an external drive. When I try it tells me i need to repartition in disk utility but that option is not there in utility. Any help much appreciated.

01-09-2012, 03:51 PM

If the drive will not mount think all the news is bad. If you can get the drive to mount see if you can clone it to an external using SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner.

Little late to suggest everyone needs a full system backup.

01-09-2012, 06:02 PM

Originally Posted by beechiller

Thanks for that. No back ups I'm afraid. When I first start disk utility it shows the disk space as being taken up so the files etc are still on the hard drive. How would I download the operating system onto an external drive. When I try it tells me i need to repartition in disk utility but that option is not there in utility. Any help much appreciated.

Yes, the files are there but unfortunately if the drive can not be accessed there is no inexpensive way to extract them. That's why I suggested data recovery software but as a trial only because I suspect it won't work.

There is a way to extract those files, however, it's very expensive. Actually it may cost you more than your computer did. Sorry for the bad news.