DiskWarrior rocks my world!
No, really!
Once again, DiskWarrior comes through with the goods. Those talented people over at Alsoft produce, IMHO, the finest disk repair utility on the Macintosh platform. This is also one fantastic utility that has survived the transition from being an outstanding product on Classic Mac OS, to being every bit as good under Mac OS X.
After trying to recover just the partition with my data on it (off the dying hard drive) via a bit of dd, it just didn't work, so I then tried dd'ing the entire disk over, partition map and all.
Once this had completed, many hours later, the disk still couldn't be mounted - and fsck (well, actually, fsck_hfs) didn't want to know about it.
Enter DiskWarrior to the rescue. It's not the fastest, but that's totally irrelevant - what matters is that the 45-odd GB of music, and 7 or so GB of photos I've faithfully gathered over the years are now safe.
Time to start thinking about backup, I suppose =)
It's very difficult to get large quantities of personal data backed up. Yep, external hard drives are expensive, but the reason I want to back up my data is so it's not sitting on a hard drive in the first place. Hard drives fail. Backing up 75 or so GB to DVD-R isn't my idea of a fun afternoon's activity. 20 or so DVD-Rs should just about cover it. Hrm. Tape is simply too expensive for a home user, even low-end stuff like AIT Turbo, or even VXA. I'm also yet to see a LTO-3 drive with a FireWire interface as well =)
Looks like I'm going to have to get some cash together and build myself some form of RAID. Four 250GB RAID spec drives (rated for operation 24x7 and with a 5 year warranty) will set me back around $200 each, then all I need is a case with a RAID 5 controller and a FireWire interface. Either that, or get a RAID controller and chuck it all in Nadia's PC.
2 Comments:
Have you tried DriveGenius yet? What about that other one, FileSalvage?
If DiskWarrior didn't work, I would have gone hunting for something else, but with a combination of some dd action, and DiskWarrior, I was able to get it all back up and running. Once I had dd'd the disk over to the new one (and did it in 1MB chunks this time, so it was faster and didn't seem to have as many problems as the first time I went with the default block size, however it was mounted on a firewire bridge-board with free airflow around it to keep it cool) I DiskWarrior'd it. Then, fsck_hfs'd it and repaired permissions. Finally, I made an image of it, file-by file, and did a block restore of this image onto my target drive, ensuring that all files were OK and were 100% defragmented...
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