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I am trying to recover data from a bad Seagate 1TB hard drive in a 2010 iMac. One day the iMac wouldn't boot (stuck at gray screen on startup). I removed the hard drive from the iMac and connected it to a MacBook using a 3.5" HDD to USB adapter. The hard drive wouldn't mount but it did display in Disk Utility that that there were 2 partitions on the disk. I tried to run Disk Warrior and it showed thousands of errors but still wouldn't mount. At this time the hard drive only show one partition in Disk Utility. Next I tried putting the hard drive in a desktop PC and running Spin Rite - which then gave me several division overflow errors (even with running Spin Rite with a newer version of DOS). The SMART status on the drive reports that the drive has had failures and HD Tune referenced the drive had once hit 59 degrees celsius. Disk Utility gives me the following message when running a pair: Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.

Overall, the hard drive spins up and sounds OK - there are no clicking noises but the hard drive won't mount and displays as a light gray "Macintosh HD" in disk utility. Any tips or advice on how to recover data on this drive would be greatly appreciated! Are there any other tools I can try before calling it quits on this drive?

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  • I have had reasonable success on OS X disks with data rescue from prosoft.
    – sdjuan
    Commented Jun 6, 2014 at 3:39

2 Answers 2

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Usually in scenarios where the disk won't mount and you get that error message the computer is trying to run a fsck in the background, check activity monitor for a fsck_hfs or similarly named process and kill it, the disk will mount for you if you're lucky.

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  • I do not see a process named that running from Activity Monitor (I verified I am looking at all processes).
    – AAA
    Commented Jun 6, 2014 at 2:50
  • It may also be hfs_fsck, I am more than a little tired. HFS drives can be pretty awful when they go south, HFS is unfortunately one of the worst parts of OS X. I have had good luck in the past with Boomerang, you might want to try it: boomdrs.com
    – Nathaniel Bannister
    Commented Jun 6, 2014 at 3:49
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When this has happened to me, I've used data recovery programs to recover the data. I would advise not to attempt any disk repair (such as Disk Utility or fsck) or other alterations until after you've recovered as much data as possible. The last time this happened was many years ago, and at that time I used a shareware program called DataRescue. I especially liked that it ran in trial mode and showed you what it could recover, and let you recover some of the data, and then, if you were happy, you paid and got a license and recovered everything. Since then, the program has a new company and I don't have experience with it, so I can't speak to the current version. If it still has similar terms, I'd suggest trying it.

If you don't want to try data recovery programs (which I would do first),an alternative if you can see the drive but the volume won't mount, would be to use dd to try and copy the data to a virtual drive. Use Disk Utility to create a sparse disk image, then dd to copy the sectors from the broken disk to the virtual one, then Disk utility to try and repair the virtual one. But I'd try data recovery software first.

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