How to Recover Data from Severely Corrupted Mac OS X HD

Macs are considered as the computers of innovative excellence. In fact, the design, advanced and useful features have collectively worked in making a brigade of loyal fan following for Mac OS X. But, at the end of every piece of appreciation and praise it is just another computer that is designed and developed to perform certain tasks.

There are many things on which the smooth functioning of your Mac depends and one among them is the file-system. File system keeps the data and their storage information in an organized way.

While booting, the Mac OS fetches this information’s from the file system and is able to load the asked data. If the file system encounters any problem, all the data in corresponding Mac volumes becomes inaccessible and you need to take the help of any Mac recoveryutility.

In the course of using your Mac, there are many situations of trouble, which never can be avoided. Most of the time, corruption of the file system is system driven and not knowingly caused by the users.

Though some external works of users lead to file system corruption in Mac, the instances are so accidental that users have hardly any role to play in them. Some of the key reasons behind file system corruption can be unexpected/improper system shut down, virus/malware infection, contradiction with newly installed hardware/software, operating system corruption etc.

Following corruption of the file system, you may come across various error messages, while trying to access the corresponding Mac volumes. One such error message that you may have encountered is written below:

“-123 wrgVolTypErr Not an HFS volume [wrong volume type error or (obsolete) operation not supported for MFS]”

The above error message indicates that the file system of your Mac has been damaged, which result in the inaccessibility of precious data in the volume. For such situations, Apple has provided one helpful inbuilt utility, 'Disk Utility'.

Disk Utility is able to repair the corrupt file system and recover inaccessible data from the troubled volumes.

In case, Disk Utility fails to resolve the problem, you can use another utility, 'fsck'. The 'fsck' utility is also a powerful application that verifies the integrity of the file system and repairs the same, if it finds any problem.

But, if there has been severe damage to the file system, both Disk Utility and 'fsck' fail to resolve the problems. Under such circumstances, you need to take the help of any advanced Mac data recovery utility to recover your lost or inaccessible data back.

This Mac software is developed with highly innovative algorithms, which can recover any data that has been lost/inaccessible due to deletion, formatting or corruption. Moreover, all such software’s are completely reliable and pretty easy to use, without even any technical assistance.

Conclusion:

StellarPhoenix Mac Data Recovery is one such utility that can easily recover the data from a severely corrupted Mac hard drive using its in-built powerful algorithms. Do give a chance to this software if you need to extract data from a damaged media.

How to Backup and Repair a Failing Mac Hard Drive

Hard-drives failures in any OS are never fun but they are a fact of today fast growing technology life whether you use a PC or Mac. Users often face problem when their hard-drive create problem after using many years, and sometimes they wind up with a HD, which goes kaput after using few months (say 6-7 months).

So, if you are a Mac users and facing problems related to your hard-drive, then here we are going to discuss with you a very simple and effective method of recovering all the deleted files and folder from a failing Mac hard-drive.

In the simple term, you are simply implementing a file transfer between 2 different drives. But, at the same time it is important to pick the best secondary data storage mediums, which backup your data easily without any issue. Thankfully, data backup redundancy is very easy to do using Time Machine and it only requires 2 external drives to be connected with the Mac OS. The below mentioned method work perfectly for a boot-drive as well, but for getting the good results you need to boot the Mac from a separate USB boot-drive.

 Check a Hard-Drive Failure Problem

A hard-drive failure can be checked in a number of different ways. In the worst case, you will hear abnormal sounds from your failing hard-drive. A failing drive may eject itself and OS X can also provide some signals when a HD will not function properly. Sometimes, when you try to connect a drive, it will forcibly mount in the ‘Read only’ mode.

Sometimes, Disk Utility won’t be able to repair the hard-drive and you will be asked to take data backup and then reformat the drive. Whether, you format the drive or not, it is going to matter a lot in the long run. For example, a ‘logical failure’ is the result of the file system corruption and ‘mechanical failure’ implies physical components of the hard-drive got damaged.

1. Power off the failing hard-drive and eject it

Simply keep the drive power off and eject it from your Mac OS X. Also, try to avoid it to reconnect until you are ready to perform all the major file transfer tasks. You don’t need to put the extra pressure on the failing drive by using it more. At the same time, you should also need to look from a data recovery mindset, it is best to leave the hard-drive powered off until, all the files come to new HD.

2. Get a new Mac drive and format or partition it

First buy a brand new drive as soon as possible. You can easily buy huge data storage drive at great prices. After buying the drive, do the following task:

• Format the drive to make it Mac compatible
• If the previous drive was partitioned, then also partition the new drive

3. Connect your Failing Hard-Drive and Start Data Transfer

Once the new drive is ready to use, connect it to your Mac OS. Now, for powering up the failing drive, simply connect it to your Mac system and then start copying your drive from failing drive to new HD. To do this, simply open a Finder window with both old and new drive, select all the data from old drive and then drag-drop to new drive for file transfer.

This data transfer process data time to complete, so be prepared to wait for it. You can also do some other tasks, while the data transfer process completes. Since waiting for hours is less useful as compared to do some other important tasks. You didn’t surprise if it takes more than 12 hours for each of the 1 TB of data transfer.

Imp.: If the data backup in your Time-Machine is on, then simply turn off it in order to prevent further data writing on the failing drive.

Final Conclusion: 

If during the data transfer process, copy of data is failing at any point or the drive continues to unmount itself randomly, you can use 3rd party software like Stellar Volume Optimizer. This software will cost only $49 and helps you to recover the data from a failing HD where the standard data transfer method fails. If all the options fail, then go with some professional data recovery software, which provides data recovery option. Such services are never cheap, but they will retrieve your deleted data within few hours.