Data Rescue 1
Mac users take note: if a drive gets corrupted, skip Disk Warrior altogether and go straight to Data Rescue II (PC users go here — but I haven’t tried it for PC).
As a graduation present for myself, I bought a 500 GB external harddrive (my internal is 160 gb so this was my first foray into SATA). I got tired of backing everything up to DVD. But I was editing video on Friday and I think either iMovie or Final Cut — probably the latter — fried my external drive.
Dumbfounded, mystified and at a loss — in the space of three hours, my drive crashed, my wireless keyboard went AWOL and sparks started flying from my Rogers Home Phone modem box. Calmly, I spent time re-configuring my keyboard. I couldn’t do anything without that. Next the phone: as soon as sparks came, I unplugged it and have been without phone since last night. Technician coming tomorrow night. And as for the drive, it has been an almost 24 hour project to recover my data. I had about 100 gb of files on it. And the thing is, you have to recover these files to “somewhere” other than the drive. I have 20 gb of space on my computer. You do the math.
So I picked the choicest, hardest to replace stuff. If I have the patience, I will back those up to DVD and start again. But I’m getting antsy to re-format the drive so I may just call it quits after this last 7 gb recovery.
Any my point? Disk Utility did nothing; Disk Warrior did nothing. Guess what worked wonders?
Yup: Data Rescue II. Let it be your first port of call in a disk-failure.