Please help! Macbook internal hard drive not detectable

Dear all,

Hope this post finds you well.

I have a very old Macbook and one day the hard drive started making skipping sounds and the system froze. Upon restarting, the machine would not boot and displayed either a white screen or a flashing question mark folder. I used a USB to boot and tried to use disk utility to repair the hard drive. However, the hard drive is not visible in the Finder or Disk Utility. I have also tried inserting the hard drive into another Macbook while booting with a USB, but the result was the same: No HD in Finder or Disk Utility.

Is it possible to recover the files from the HD? Any help would be much appreciated.

Kind regards
Xierong

Looks like a dead hard drive to me. With the sounds that you mentioned hearing that the HD was making…file recovery by an end-user will be next to impossible. This is because it sounds like the HD has had a serious mechanical failure.

There are professional file recovery services out there…but they are VERY expensive. There are also consumer level file recovery programs that cost about $100. But when an HD has a serious mechanical failure (like it sounds like this HD has had)…file recovery software is not going to help.

Of course proper backups would have made file recovery very easy…but I'm going to assume that there is no backup.

Sorry to say it…but I don't think file recovery on this HD is going to be very easy…unless you are willing to spend big bucks on a professional file recovery service.

- Nick

Thank you for your help. It's very much appreciated.

Do you think it would be worth to get a USB to SATA adapter and give it one last try with Data Rescue or something similar? I understand that it's most likely a mechanical fault but just wanted to exhaust all possibilities before giving up.

Many thanks
Xierong

Xierong said:

Do you think it would be worth to get a USB to SATA adapter and give it one last try with Data Rescue or something similar? I understand that it's most likely a mechanical fault but just wanted to exhaust all possibilities before giving up.

Click to expand...

The main problem is the "skipping sounds" you mentioned in your first post. This skipping sound (if I'm interpreting it correctly) happens when there is a mechanical failure inside of the hard drive.

I'll present an analogy. Maybe you are familiar with old record album players (the things that we old-timers used to play vinyl records on)!

Think of the vinyl record on the record player like the spinning disk inside of a hard drive. Now also picture the arm & needle on the record player as being very similar to the read & write head inside of a hard drive.

The "skipping sound" you mentioned may be the read/write head inside the hard drive "flicking" back & forth very quickly across the the hard drive disks/platters inside the hard drive. The read/write head/heads is/are NOT supposed to do this. If he read/write head can't read what's on the hard disk platters...then you cannot recover the data (but an expensive professional data recovery service may be able to recover). This is the mechanical problem.

This all assumes that I am interpreting this "skipping sound" correctly. If I am wrong...maybe you will be able to recover your data using Data Rescue. If so that would be great!...but I would hate to see you spend about $100 for Data Rescue...and not be able to recover anything.

It comes down to how valuable is the data you need to recover...and is that possible data recovery worth the $100 purchase for Data Rescue (but also realizing the data may not be recoverable with Data Rescue)?

It's basically is a risk/reward situation.

- Nick

On the older IBM DeskStar range, known colloquically as the "DeathStar', that skipping was described as a ticking sound and was 100% the forerunner of hard drive failure. And at this stage, alas data recovery can be very hit and mostly miss.

Fingers crossed.

Hi,

The broken HD belongs to a friend of mine (although I own the same antique Macbook) and we have decided to let it go given that there is not anything vital to be retrieved from the dead HD.

Thank you all very much for your help and advice. Have a good day!