Mac Data Recovery

[Machfive]

The day I've dreaded has come, so it's time to take a crash course.

A friend of mine's Mac just took a dump. They're pretty sure it's the hard drive, based on what they're seeing, and I'll be laying hands on it tomorrow.

Obviously, physical diagnostics won't differ from PC drives; Spinrite or a manufacturer specific utility will let me know if the drive has taken a total shit or if it's a logical problem with the partition/filesystem/whatever.

The best case scenario (for them, and for me, really) is that the drive is workable and can be accessed, and doesn't need to go off to one of those data recovery services that charges $2000+.

But accessing the Mac drive only half the battle, because unlike a working PC drive, I can't just run my disk cloning/imaging software or my NTFS data recovery software.

I've got no Macs to use to try and mount the drive to, or to install Mac recovery software on.

So the question is, are there any Windows-based utilities any of you have used that allow access to the Mac filesystem, allow cloning/imaging thereof, or are capable of performing recovery on a la the Trueimages, Recovermyfiles, or Getdatabacks on the PC side?

Thanks in advance.

[Michael Fortson]

You might be able to start the system in Target Disk mode (command-T at boot) and connect it to another mac (or a PC running something like MacDrive (http://www.mediafour.com/)) via Firewire and just recover data manually.

[Fugitive]

And it's not really a recovery tool, but HFSExplorer (http://hem.bredband.net/catacombae/hfsx.html) will let you browse the filesystem from Windows (assuming it's HFS, of course). There are others that let you mount the filesystem directly as a drive letter, but all of the ones I remember finding were commercial products.

[EvilIdler]

Can't you boot from a Leopard installation disc and access the files there? It should recognise and mount external drives,
so you can copy files via Terminal from the broken system to that.

[Machfive]

Well, false alarm. The drive is so buggered it won't even pass the short test in Seatools, so it's off to the data recovery shop.

I'll have to find a working HFS drive and test out some of these tools on it to see what does the trick for future reference. Thanks for the starting points, guys.