# Fried iMac drive -- Is data recovery possible?



## delta9 (Mar 12, 2006)

Here's the scenario... I was happily working away on my 20" iMac (2 Ghz, G5 w/1.5 GB RAM) when my building experienced a power outage. Power was restored a few minutes later but my iMac wouldn't turn back on. One new motherboard later, my iMac is able to powerup (although my USB ports now don't seem to work reliably -- but that's another story) but my internal 250GB drive isn't recognized by the system.

I've booted from an external drive and tried all the common recovery utilities with no luck. Apple's Disk Utility sort of sees the drive but gives no options for recovery. Here's the drive info from Disk Utility...

Name : WDC WD2500
Type : Disk

Disk Identifier : disk0
Media Name : WDC WD2500 Media
Media Type : Generic
Connection Bus : Serial ATA
Connection Type : Internal
Connection ID : Device 0
Device Tree : first-boot/@0:0
Writable : Yes
Ejectable : No
Mac OS 9 Drivers Installed : No
Location : Internal
Total Capacity : 0 Bytes
S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported
Disk Number : 0
Partition Number : 0

In Disk Warrior 3.0.3 the drive doesn't even appear in the popup menu (under the Directory tab). The drive does show up under the Hardware tab but the Test Device button is grayed out.

In Data Rescue II the drive shows up as a O byte capacity device and even a Thorough Scan doesn't discover any files.

The drive doesn't show up at all in Data Recycler X or Drive 10.

Can anyone tell me what's going on? Any suggestions on how I may be able to recover the data? I've experienced drive problems before but never anything like this.

TIA


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

good thing i didn't post in the other forum. but if none of the drive saving apps can get to it, the only way to get info off of it is to take it to a place that will take the drive apart and use special machines to read the platers and transfer the info to a new drive, or cd/dvds.


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## shuuhen (Sep 4, 2004)

I think I'll have to agree with sinclair_tm on this. It looks like there is a hardware problem with the drive. If it reads zero capacity, then I'd bet something is stopping it from reading any of the plates in the drive.

If you have a copy of TechTool Pro, you might want to run the hard drive diagnostics, although I don't expect it will be able to help.

If you can, try the internal drive in another computer and/or try another drive in the place of the 250 GB drive in your computer. Again, the internal drive probably has hardware damage from what sounds like a power surge.


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

Um, this post is over 3 years old. Please limit responding to posts that the last response was within the last 3 weeks, unless you started the thread.


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