I wasn't expecting it to help at all, as I haven't been impressed with Norton recently, but it miraculously managed to restore virtually every file on the hard drive, succeeding where every other program I tried had failed. It can rebuild the directory from scratch by scanning the entire hard drive for bits of files. Norton Volume Recover, I think it's called. Oops.Īt this point, I ran a Norton program. On the other hand, I once tried to run it on a damaged hard drive, and after about a day, it finally finished, and when it tried to overwrite the old directory data with the rebuilt data, gave me a message saying that there was a write error, and diskwarrior had just unintentionally destroyed ALL directory data, and that while some files were accessible at that moment, the next time I restarted everything would be gone. and successfully restoring a system that had been unable to start up before. The amount of time diskwarrior takes can definitely vary widely: although it often takes only a few seconds to run, I've heard of it taking as long as three days on a damaged hard drive. After that, I was able mount the volume and get my most important files back. I was then able to run DiskWarrior to repair the remaining problems (faster this time because there were no bad blocks) on that new partition. ddrescue -v MyVolImage.dmg /dev/disk1s3 MyVolRestore.log Then I used ddrescue to copy the image file back onto the new partition: So I got a new disk (to be sure there were not bad blocks and to keep the original disk intact, just in case) and created a partition with pdisk of the exact same size (number of blocks) of the original partition (and the image file, remember a block is usually 512 bytes).
#MAC OS 10.4 RECOVERY DISK PLUS#
I don't know why not maybe because it was an HFS Plus journaled partition. Then I tried to mount the image file, but it did not work.
It will use the log file to pick up where it stoped last. I was monitoring the action by looking at the log ddrescue produces, and using this command:Ī cool feature of ddrescue is that you can stop and resume its activity. The computer really slows down (everything freezes) during that kind of operation. ddrescue retried several times until I considered that there was no hope to recover these dead blocks (initially there were read errors on about 3000 blocks, and at the end, it turned out that 900 blocks had died). The were errors reported during the copy of few blocks. ddrescue -v /dev/disk0s5 MyVolImage.dmg MyVolRescue.log The syntax for ddrescue is quite simple and here are the steps I followed:Ĭopy the content of the volume into an image file: Then you can run ddrescue (once compiled, it would probably also run on 10.3). To compile, open the Terminal and cd to the ddrescue directory, and then run the following commands:
I then tried to compile it on Tiger, and it worked the first time (great to see Linux tools compiling on OS X without causing a headache). I tried to compile ddrescue on Panther and it did not work. Then, looking aroung on the net, I found a Linux tool called GNU ddrescue made by Antonio Diaz Diaz (not to be confused with dd_rescue written by Kurt Garloff, which was mentionned in one of the comments of the original article). So I decided to look what other tools were available, I looked on macosxhints, and found this article about using dd to make a block copy of a volume (e.g. I tried using DiskWarrior, but it was really slow - the message was saying something like "speed inhibted by disk malfunction." It was so slow, I was not sure if it had crashed, or if it would take weeks to get through. Using Apple's Disk Utility repair function failed to fix the drive. When looking at the disk with Apple's Disk Utility, the disk is visible, the name of the volume is not displayed (/dev/disk0s5 was displyed instead), and the volume would not mount. It had three HFS Plus journaled partitions. I had a problem with my disks (an original Maxtor from a dual G5).