Corrupted Files

Hey there, I just switched to Mac and am happy as can be.

Hoooowever,

I've got a bit of an unrelated problem. My old harddrive is corrupted - or at least, a chunk of the files are corrupted. It has all my old work and photographs on it, which is a bit of a bummer.

When I try moving things out of the drive, it'll crash at some point - i.e. the progress bar will freeze, and about 5 minutes later I'll get a message saying I unplugged it correctly. I tried doing the folders separately, and found that most of the files would go, but certain corrupt files will stop everything (coincidentally enough all in my work folder .)

Anyway, on my PC, I used to be able to see the progress of each individual item being moved, which helped me to identify the dodgy files. Considering that each time I do this process on my mac, it essentially unplugs the drive in the middle of a data transfer, I can't afford to do it by trial and error.

So my questions aaaare:

1. Is there any way to repair corrupt data on a harddrive?

-if not-

2. Is there any way to automatically identify and delete corrupt files on a harddrive (I've tried using an anti-virus scan on both Mac and PC)?

Ideally, the best solution would be an app which copies the harddrive contents onto my other harddrive, and simply ignores the corrupt files, but that may be a bit far.

I wouldn't come on a forum and make it my first post to ask for help, but I'm really at my wits end here.

Thanks!

1. Not so much repair, as to retrieve. Data recovery Apple - Downloads - System/Disk Utilities - Stellar Phoenix Macintosh Data Recovery Software or Data Recovery Software, Hard Drive Data/File Recovery Software - Windows/Mac.
2. Trying to open a corrupted file with its parent application (or sustitute) will soon enough tell you if the file is bad.

Can you remove the old hard drive? You may be able to transfer some of the stuff thereon using an (S)ATA-USB2 adaptor to either your new Mac, to a PC machine, even to an external hard drive via another Mac. See Amazon.com: Sabrent USB-DSC5 Serial ATA or IDE 2.5-/3.5-Inch to USB 2.0 Cable Converter Adapter….

You can copy everything to another computer using SuperDuper of CarbonCopy Cloner, but if the files are in some way damaged, I'd not use that method.

OS X does show you transfer progress, but not as 'nicely' as the WinOS does. I liked those flying files and folders!

hughvane said:

1. Not so much repair, as to retrieve. Data recovery Apple - Downloads - System/Disk Utilities - Stellar Phoenix Macintosh Data Recovery Software or Data Recovery Software, Hard Drive Data/File Recovery Software - Windows/Mac.
2. Trying to open a corrupted file with its parent application (or sustitute) will soon enough tell you if the file is bad.

Can you remove the old hard drive? You may be able to transfer some of the stuff thereon using an (S)ATA-USB2 adaptor to either your new Mac, to a PC machine, even to an external hard drive via another Mac. See Amazon.com: Sabrent USB-DSC5 Serial ATA or IDE 2.5-/3.5-Inch to USB 2.0 Cable Converter Adapter….

You can copy everything to another computer using SuperDuper of CarbonCopy Cloner, but if the files are in some way damaged, I'd not used that method.

OS X does show you transfer progress, but not as 'nicely' as the WinOS does. I liked those flying files and folders!

Click to expand...

Thank you for your reply. I was thinking more something which will just scan and tell you quickly, since its about a thousand photoshop files and so on, and would take donkey's to get through.

I'm going to try the first, but why would the second be any good, if it's the files which are corrupted, and not a problem with the enclosure?

I guess you could try this Download Preferential Treatment for Mac - Scans for corrupt preference files. MacUpdate Mac Software Downloads (read the guff about it), but I can't imagine, quite frankly, that ALL those P'shop files are corrupted. That's why I suggested transferring them away from their present location via an adaptor, and then identifying the ones that have 'gone bad'.