Hard Drive cannot be repaired by disk utility, how can I recover files?

Hello!

My Mac recently stopped booting, I managed to boot the 'Recovery' partition and launch disk utility. It said that there was a problem with it and it needed to be repaired. I clicked repair but it showed a message saying it couldn't be repaired and that I should backup my files.

I'm not new to mac and I'm used to problems like this on PC but it's never happened to me on Mac before so I need some help.

How can I gain access to the files to back them up if I can't boot into the HDD?
I've got another mac laptop (PowerBook G4) but I don't have a firewire cable to do target mode. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Oli.

Easy

Restore from your Mac Time Machine.

wolfpuppies3 said:

Restore from your Mac Time Machine.

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I don't have a time machine backup

If the hard drive needs repairing, restoring from Time Machine is not going to work anyway. However, you should be making backups - regardless.

I've got another mac laptop (PowerBook G4) but I don't have a firewire cable to do target mode. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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I don't see that you have any other choice. Buy a firewire cable and boot using Target Mode and recover what data you can.

Bit late to suggest using an external HDD as a Time Machine or cloned backup.

Commercial data recovery costs an arm and a leg. DataRecovery3 has a trial version if you like to give it a try. If you can read the files on the drive, may well be worth the $99 price tag:-


http://download.cnet.com/Stellar-Phoenix-Mac-Data-Recovery/3000-2248_4-10745424.html

MarryWilson said:

When data in the MAC operating system corrupts, you need to use a professional MAC recovery software to rescue the data. There are several third party recovery software that provide high- tech MAC recovery utility to recover lost data from HFS and HFS+ volumes. Kernel for MAC data recovery software recover MAC data from crashed hard drive, corrupt partition table, boot sector and formatted partitions.

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That isn't necessarily true. It really depends on the fault with the drive and whether the data required is corrupt.

Oli-783:
You can take the disk out of your Mac - this is pretty easy if you have a MacBook. Once out you can connect the drive to a sata-to-USB adapter or put it in a hard disk enclosure then connect it to you other MacBook. From there, depending on the level of corruption you should be able to copy data from the disk.

As it looks as though you will have to replace the drive anyway you could also install or have installed a new disk in your Mac, install Lion and then connect the old disk using the above methods and copy the files straight back to your Mac.