Mac Hard Drive Recovery with Bonus Time Machine Drive

Two Hitachi drives from Macs that stopped working

A lot of the recoveries I get locally are referrals from computer repair shops around Kansas. Many people don’t know what the problem is with their computer until a repair shop takes a look and lets them know it is the hard drive inside the computer and that they will need data recovery if they don’t have a backup of any important data. Mac Hard Drive Recovery These two drives came from a customer in McPherson that was recommended to me by a local computer repair shop. The repair shop had diagnosed their 2010 Mac mini as having a bad drive. It had stopped booting fully and instead would just get stuck on the spinning wheel during startup. The customer had used Time Machine to both back up their computer every once in a while, and also to archive old files that they no longer needed to store on the computer itself. Side note here, I don’t recommend using Time Machine as an archiving utility, it is strictly for back up as it prunes archived … Read more

Recovering Failed Time Machine Backup – Crisis Averted

Seagate ST4000LM016 4TB

This failed Time Machine backup drive was mailed in from Burbank in Southern California for data recovery. The reported issue was a buzzing sound when you first plug it in for a split second, then another short buzz sound, then another, then silence. The drive would not spin up and would not be recognized by any machine. The client had been using the drive as an archive drive as well as a backup drive, so it was important that the data be recovered. Recovering A Failed Time Machine When you are recovering a failed Time Machine backup, it is best if you are able to get 100% of the sectors imaged and then work on getting the image to mount. A mounting Time Machine drive should work to continue using with Time Machine, whereas a drive that you have to recover with data recovery software will have the files present, but you will have to start your Time Machine backups fresh. Diagnosing the failed Time Machine Backup The first step is to open the drive … Read more