On Mon, 6 Oct 2003, mathieu wrote: > I hope I'll have a price for off-topic questions but you guys seem to know > everything about anything so I'll give it a try. > A while ago I asked a question about some hds problems. Now I blame it on my > mb's chipset overheating. > Satruday, the two hds of my girlfriend's macintosh "died". First, three (out > of four) partitions of one of them disappeared, then the five partitions of > the other. A year and a half ago, she had the same problem with another disk > in the same box. Since she has two disk, she gave up on backuping datas on > CDs. So she has lost an huge amount of work. > I tried to help her: patched my kernel for hfs+ support, emerged hfsutils and > hfsplusutils, compiled apple partitions support and then didn't know what to > do: disks answer to hdparm, fdisk doesn't see anything, diskdrake (from my > mandrake partition) sees a lot of partitions (13 If i remember), hfs sees 5 > partitions. Still I can't mount anything. In /dev, I've got hdc, but no hdc1, > hdc2, ... cat-ting /dev/hdc prints garbage for a while (normal) then gets > stuck. > Question 1: can it be the mac that kills the disks? > Question 2: Is there a hope that I could save some partitions. > any help welcome, thanks in advance.
My greatest success for recovering info off a Mac disk have been as follows: 1) Have a working firewire-capable Mac with Norton Utilities installed. 2) If the bad Mac doesn't have firewire, take the drives out and put them in firewire (or USB) enclosures. 2a) If the bad Mac does have firewire, boot in target firewire mode (hold down T while booting). 3) Hook up drive (or Mac) to the working Mac. 4) Run Norton Utilities. 5) Repeat 4 until no more errors are reported. One hard drive I worked on took three days to run Norton on, but everything was retrieved. The computer was then sent back to Apple, who replaced the hard drive under warranty. Usually, you can be done within a day. The biggest problem I've found with using Linux to read Mac drives is that the hfs(plus) utils don't seem to have recursive options (ie, no 'hcp -r') and while Linux can read a working hfsplus partition, it can't fix it. Why does it happen? I don't know. -- Marshal Newrock, unemployed Linux user in Lansing, MI Caution: Product will be hot after heating -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
