# Hard drive failure/recovery



## JButts15 (Apr 28, 2011)

Hi there. I need something of an explanation for the scenario I'm about to describe, as well as next steps.

I had a 1TB Seagate hard drive recently "fail" on me. I'm trying to figure out to what extent currently. OSX had gotten into a funk of stuttering and needing to be hard restarted (even when booted in safe mode) until finally the drive just wouldn't boot anymore. In Disk Utility, the drive will only appear in the list of drives after it'd been removed from the tower for a while, though it still would not boot, and said it could not be repaired.

So, I went out and bought a replacement drive and a copy of Data Rescue 3 to perform a clone on the drive. It finally finished this morning, after 16 days of "cloning" to the replacement hard drive. When I attempted to boot the drive, it did not work. It does not even show up in the list of drives it when booting with the option key pressed. The new drive does appear in Disk Utility, though it does not show up with the name I'd used to reformat it. Rather, it just has the default name of a freshly-erased drive. It also does not display any data about the drive in the Info pane, but does say that the drive is Journaled and bootable.

Okay, strange... I switch on over into Boot Camp under a different drive and install MacDrive to see if it can be accessed this way. But, here it says that the drive is totally empty. And further, that it has not even been formatted! 

Now I'm just totally confused. What had this application been doing for half a month? My thoughts are leading me to believe that maybe there was not a hardware issue with the drive as I first suspected. Instead, perhaps some piece of boot data had been corrupted. I can't imagine that the cloning process did nothing. But what are the odds that it would have cloned the "bad" data as well?

This is throwing me for a loop and I really need some help. Anything the community could offer is much appreciated. 

Thanks.


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## MacBK09 (Oct 28, 2009)

Get the latest version of DiskWarrior 3.4 (i think) and try to repair the Mac OSX partition. Earlier versions may not work on 10.6.7.


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

If the drive stops showing up, but then will show up after it's been unpowered for a while, says to me the drive is in fact bad. What was the clone software doing all that time, trying it's best to clone a drive that disappeared. It started off doing it's job, and when while it was copying some info to the new drive, the old one goes off line, so that when the software goes to read, there is nothing. So it copies nothing. It took so long because it was trying to do it's job, and so it sat and waited for the other drive to respond.


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## martinmack (Sep 18, 2009)

You have bad blocks in your drive so i suspect it would not clone anything....I think you should repair the permissions either you should try bootable DVD to clone the boot volume of your Mac..


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## Jay_JWLH (Apr 30, 2008)

If a HDD started appearing and disappearing from the OS, then I wouldn't have any reason to trust it much more than it deserves. A faulty drive is a faulty drive, and you would be lucky to be able to retrieve any byte of data that you can off it before it finally manages to brick itself completely.

Instead of trying to boot off a drive/partition that was created from recovery data, what you really should be doing is trying to recover any and all individual files off what you recovered, checking to make sure they work (in case they were corrupted), and just use them as usual on your new install.


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