Be Excellent To Each Other

OK, I'm no FSA, but my significant other suffered a HDD failure at work on Friday last week. Her IT dept seems to be either lazy or incompetent as they maintain they couldn't retrieve any data at all from the HDD in question (it's a WD 160Gb from a iG5) - they even suggested freezing it, I kid ye not, to try and restore it. Basically her machine wouldn't boot successfully and I think they ran out of imagination with Disk Warrior.

Anyway, they've not tried at all and given up. I now have the drive. What would I need to try and see if there's anything recoverable on it? I have various macs in the house - an iG5 and a MacBook Pro. I don't think it's a virus more likely a mechanical failure (hopefully) on part of the drive.

If it's mechanical surely you are fucked?

Have you done that trick where you connect one mac to another (With firewire I think) than hold apple+T [citation very much needed] on the fucked machine and it launches in target mode or something.

Then it should appear as a hard drive on your good mac.

That or pop it into an external casing (but I guess you tried that).

Sometime the partition tables on a drive can get fucked - so maybe they need repairing.

I guess you've tried all this basic stuff - but it's all I know and I thought I would offer it in the off chance.

Haven't tried anything yet and I don't know what the IT dept at HC's office tried either. I do know they're beyond contempt in their laziness.

IT departments can be lazy, after all users do back up don't they. They don't leave all their work on a HDD, do they?

In HC's case she doesn't have any means to back-up. She's put in a request for a 2Tb RAID array on her actual desk for all the machines in her department. This particular department refused for months to upgrade one of the machines in the department to a newer version of Stuffit claiming it was too difficult when they can do it remotely and it takes about 1 minute!

Anyway, what I want to know is this - I have the actual HDD out of the machine, what do I need to read this on one of my Macs just to see if there is anyway I can retrieve some of her personal stuff?

Yes, as Lave said just put it in an external enclosure (they are pretty cheap) and then see if it shows up in Disk Utility. If it does you're probably going to be able to rescue something - try the First Aid options. (I wouldn't bother trying to boot off it - you already know it's knackered beyond that)

If it doesn't show up at all then the controller board may be dead - replacing it with one off the the same model drive from ebay can rescue that.

The other alternative is that the mechanism is knackered and you won't be able to do anything short of sending it to data rescue place and paying £1000

Good luck!