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A possible way to save a corrupted drive or partition Apps
An unhappy event happened to a cheese-maker friend -- he hadn't made any back-ups of his old G3 tower, and naturally the hard disk went down along with all the recipes of his award-winning cheeses. I tried all the usual -- TechTool, DiskWarrior, Disk Utility -- but they all just threw up their (figurative) hands in horror and simply gave up. (Disk Utility would see the disk, but not mount it).

In a fit of desparation, I told Disk Utility to make an image of the seen but un-mountable partitions. And quite surprisingly, it worked!

I have yet to verify that his important data is there (he lives a couple of hundred kilometres away, and won't be back here for a couple of weeks), but it all *seems* to be there. It reminded me of the good-old-Apple ][ days when a dead floppy could often be resurrected by simply copying it.

I hope that someone else may benefit from this simple fix.
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A possible way to save a corrupted drive or partition
Authored by: fitzage on Dec 02, '05 07:21:36AM

This often works. After doing this, sometimes cloning the clone back to the main drive will fix it. A method that works even more often is cloning the bad drive to an external firewire drive, reinstalling the OS, and using the Migration Assistant to bring everything back off the old drive.



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A possible way to save a corrupted drive or partition
Authored by: woodgie on Dec 02, '05 09:31:54AM

Just a (possible) reason this works from experience and discussion with other knowledgeable people. I'm sure I'm not entirely right and I have no doubt I'll be unceremoniously put right in short order.

When you make a Disk Image from a disk (as opposed to a folder full of files) Disk Utility makes it using Block Copies, that is it copies 1s and 0s directly from the drive in (off the top of my head) 512 byte chunks. This bypasses (most of) the need to read a possibly damaged/corrupt file catalogue that prevents file level reads and writes. Therefore if the disk catalogue is damaged and the OS can't mount the drive, you can still make a block copy of the drive (mostly).

There's one caveat. You may find, as I have, that while you made the Disk Image without a problem, as you may have Block Copied a corrupt/damaged disk catalogue you might find you have troubles mounting/reading the Disk Image. (I'm sure it's more complex than that though.)

Now, that was very oversimplified. I await those more knowledgeable to pick it to pieces :)



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A possible way to save a corrupted drive or partition
Authored by: macraptor on Dec 03, '05 10:38:38AM

I received a "dead" DVD from a friend yesterday. It was a DVD of a photoshoot, and although Toast could "see" the DVD and save as a disk image, nothing would mount. I could not see the contents.

So I took this hint and … voila. The Disk Utilities disk image of the Toast disk image does mount and play in the DVD player. Many thanks - I'll keep it in mind for the future.



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A possible way to save a corrupted drive or partition
Authored by: Hal Itosis on Dec 05, '05 09:03:26AM
> the hard disk went down along with all
> the recipes of his award-winning cheeses.


Wow... that's the most original euphemism for p0rn that I've ever heard.

;-)

Excellent tip btw... thanks.

-HI-



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A possible way to save a corrupted drive or partition
Authored by: woodgie on Dec 06, '05 09:17:35AM

Must... avoid... jokes... about... going down...



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