Glitched HDD; Photorec did not recover everything, please help?

originally posted by: ArMaP
The problem with recovering data from a damaged disk/file system is that it depends, some programs are better at some things than others.

I have had good results with Photorec/Testdisk, but I also have to use other programs because Photorec/Testdisk wasn't able to find the files I was trying to recover.

I also had good results with Easeus, and they have Windows and Mac versions.

So, if I were you, I would download the free EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac, which allows only the recovery of up to 2 GB (I never tried to see if using it a second time you can recover another 2 GB, I suppose it does).
When you start using, as soon as you get the list of the disks available, select the affected disk and make an image, that way you have a copy of the disk, so if the disk is really damaged and gets worse by being read, you have the image to work with.
From what you have said, it's probably a file system error, not a physical damage to the disk platers, so the data should all be there.

Good luck!

Thank you, and you basically seem to be the only one person who I've talked to, this past year, who is really familiar with this. So I really appreciate your input.



Also it's amazing how obscure it can seem, as the really correct solution is to avoid such a situation in the 1st place. So it ends up that most people don't seem to have experience actually recovering data from a glitched hdd.




Btw a friend mentioned Recuva but I don't know if that's a relevant program or not.






Once in the past, I glitched an external hdd (because it was connected to my Win 10 PC which was glitching out) and Photorec seemed successful with that recovery.

(Unrelated but that same ext. hdd became glitched again, years after the 1st time, and Photorec seemed successful again, a 2nd time with that same ext. hdd. This 2nd glitch-out was related to my Mac processing the hdd, I wanted to shut everything down, so I quit Finder which was processing the hdd, then shut down my Mac, but it glitched that ext. hdd for its 2nd time.)






My current glitched hdd might be extra glitched / extra difficult... because I had manually shut down my Mac a few times, when she was freezing... so if each time was damage, then it's a few blasts of damage, maybe. And maybe that makes it extra difficult to recover...

As explained I did successfully use Photorec twice, to recover data from my old store-bought ext. hdd, which became glitched two separate times.

So my current glitched hdd... is my 3rd time attempting data recovery and it's the only time it didn't work to just use Photorec...

From what you have said, it's probably a file system error, not a physical damage to the disk platers, so the data should all be there.

^Thank you, I expect it's all still there, and I appreciate your vote of confidence that it's probably all still here.

For example I had a 20-minute beautiful iMovie project that I'd love to recover, and I don't want to recreate it separately, since I should be able to recover it.

originally posted by: JamesChessman
Also it's amazing how obscure it can seem, as the really correct solution is to avoid such a situation in the 1st place.

If you have important data, backups are your best friend.

At work, I have daily backups of all important data to a dedicated computer and weekly backups of those backups to cloud storage.

Btw a friend mentioned Recuva but I don't know if that's a relevant program or not.

From what I have seen, Recuva is good at recovering deleted files or files from a formatted drive (although it wasn't able to find the files on the USB stick I mentioned above because it had a different file system).

^Thank you, I expect it's all still there, and I appreciate your vote of confidence that it's probably all still here.

Modern drives are not as likely to create physical damage on the surface of the platters (two "t", not one, as I wrote it before) as the old ones, as the old drives, when they lost power, they would let the reading/writing head drop on the surface of the platters, while modern drives have an automatic parking feature that moves the head to the parking area when it detects an unexpected power loss.

For example I had a 20-minute beautiful iMovie project that I'd love to recover, and I don't want to recreate it separately, since I should be able to recover it.

Losing work to a computer failure is something I know very well.
Many years ago, I was working on an accounting company. They had an Unix System V computer with daily backups. At the end of the backup they ran a verification step, to see if what was written was there. Everything appeared to be as it should.

A few months after I started working there the computer (an Olivetti) had a drive failure (probably due to a wrong internal design, as the disks had to be installed in a way that would leave the electronics board facing up, so it gathered a lot of dust and cigarette smoke).
No problem, said the guy responsible for the IT at the company (he was not a worker there, he had a contract to go there once a month to see if everything was OK, to set up any new thing we needed, etc.), we just restore the last backup.

That's when the problem was found.
Yes, we had daily backups with a verification test, bad the backup was badly configured and the test had the same problem: instead of using the tape device, both the backup and the test used the null device. The null device is (among other things) used to test things with a large output that we are not interested in at that phase of the tests, as sending any thing to the null device means it will be ignored.
So, we had been doing daily backups of all the data to nothing, and the verification step was comparing nothing to nothing, and we ended up with no backups.
In this case, we had to reinstall everything and input nine months of accounting data from dozens of companies in a couple of months.
The guy responsible for all this was obviously replaced by another guy, that decided it would be a good idea to replace the Unix system with a Novel network, but that's a different story.

In conclusion, backup all important data, verify it, and then backup the backups if the data is really important and verify those backups too.

PS: the guy responsible for the above mentioned problem was a captain in the air force and a professor on some IT courses on private companies, and he had been my professor. Some years later, now working on another company part of the same group that owned the accounting company, I found that guy had been promoted to major and was the main responsible for air force's headquarters' IT.

a reply to: ArMaP

Thanks I’m on vacation rn and I’m anxious to get the recovery started. I didn’t rush into it because there seemed no crystal clear solution yet. I might call Apple tech support and ask what they think because my video project was in Apple iMovie, so that’s really the specific file type that I really want to recover… although I’ve previously been told that Apple does not do data recovery, so it’s a confusing situation. But I think I’ll ask them as much as I can because it’s their file type that I’m needing to recover…

Well I recently bought a thunderbolt cable (to connect the glitched hdd to my Mac) because I'm convinced that the regular USB connection, had a ton of lag and extra processing, apparently.

Although nobody ever really suggested that.

Haven't tried it yet but fingers crossed that my iMovie files might actually pop up now (if thunderbolt cuts out the lag / extra processing).

^I'm not sure if it helps, because there's still a ton of lag (or excessive processing) when my Mac is trying to look at the glitched hdd.

However this is still something I'm glad that I bought, the thunderbolt cable, because it's at least cutting out the POTENTIAL of the old USB connection, being a choking point, possibly.

And thunderbolt is at least the absolute FASTEST CONNECTION.

So I'm glad for the fact of having the best, fastest connection to my old glitched hdd... at least for knowing that it's now, the best possible set-up, here.

I'll see what I can do, now. Maybe I'll run Photorec again and maybe try a new recovery program etc. in the future.

a reply to: JamesChessman

Even if the drive is bad, it will always be faster to check and, eventually, recover the files with a faster connection.

originally posted by: ArMaP
a reply to: JamesChessman

Even if the drive is bad, it will always be faster to check and, eventually, recover the files with a faster connection.

Thanks!

Yes it's a nice step, it feels good that I made this bit of tangible progress (at least, knowing that it's the fastest connection, and knowing that I cut out any potential USB lag / choking point).



Also I'm glad that I took my time with this: It wouldn't help if I had just made a bunch of failed recovery attempts, with a bunch of diff. programs, it would be a lot of garbage files, just be a big mess.




*** Unfortunately, now I'm seeing that the damn drive is really still demanding tons of processing, for my Mac to look at it.

So it seems the same original problem, and I still believe that my old content is not showing, mainly because of the massive drain of processing, that my Mac is still getting bogged down in.



I can at least play around with it better now (with the thunderbolt cable), and I'm able to look around my glitched hdd, just a little (as I could, beforehand).





...But this main problem remains. My Mac spends hours processing everything, just to look at my glitched hdd.

So it might be the inescapable conclusion, that it's still the wrong way, apparently.







Also my iMovie project (which is on the glitched drive) was nearly 20 minutes long, and it was a few gigs in size... so it might just be way too huge, for this process.

For reference, my Mac was having trouble opening up a folder of images (on the glitched hdd), which means it's practically impossible that this method would ever get around to recovering my old huge iMovie files.

(So like, maybe Finder is the wrong program to be using here: It's the default file viewer program on Mac, but it's not working great here.)





I still feel like someone should be able to plug it into the right machine and right software and get my old stuff back. I started visiting a local computer shop, so I can at least ask the guy about it.





Also it's really not an option to pay someone to recover the drive. I'm looking at it again now recently. The very first thing that comes up, is that mentioned folder of about 800 pictures, of the most beautiful model ever, which was really the last thing I made on the old hdd, before everything glitched out.

So I think that's enough of a reason to avoid the embarrassment of actually bringing the hdd to someone else to look through it, no thanks, lol.

It's just 800 photos of an adult, modeling... but I really don't want to bring that, to other people, to look through it, lol!!

a reply to: JamesChessman

I work in a company that, among other things, repairs computers, and sometimes we find unexpected photos and videos on the clients' computers.

originally posted by: ArMaP
a reply to: JamesChessman

I work in a company that, among other things, repairs computers, and sometimes we find unexpected photos and videos on the clients' computers.

Haha I know. I always heard stories about such situations happening: Computer problems, and then there's objectionable content, recovered. (Whatever that is, for whatever specific situations.)




And so: Since I was never interested in wrong things / objectionable things, in the 1st place, then:

I always expected that if I had computer problems, then I wouldn't mind people looking thru my stuff, and recovering it, etc.





However, now that it actually happened, serious computer problems here: There's no way I'd ask anyone to look through my glitched drive, lol.

Especially that it was the last thing I did before my hdd glitched out: I was downloading hundreds of photos of the most beautiful model ever.

And so that would be the center of any recovery effort, lol. Guys looking through my folder of 800 photos of that model.

Absolutely no thanks, lol.




It's beside the point, that it's perfectly normal, mainstream model photos. It's still not something I'm interested in giving to other people to look through, lol.



(And btw, there was NO malware involved, it was the first thing I expected, and I checked for that. The real problem was apparently that I had left my Mac on for far too long, which made her start freezing for hours during boot-up. And then I did a few manual shut-downs, during that boot-up, so I really destroyed my hdd, with those manual shut-downs.)

^I might as well explain it better, what happened with my hdd getting glitched, back in 2021:

I was naive, and overly trusting of my Mac and its programs, to work perfectly. I was too trusting in that, back in 2021. (Because my Mac was definitely the BEST computer I ever had, including a 1TB internal hdd... so I was thinking of it as the perfect storage space.)

So with too much blind-faith in everything, I was leaving my Mac on for a few months in a row. I was actually curious if she would get increasingly bogged-down, and if so, then what would happen, like would she force an automatic shut down, for example. I didn't think it was a dangerous thing, though.

So she was running for a few months in a row. That included a large iMovie project, because as it turns out, movie creation / editing, is a very exhausting thing, for her. (Not something that I had expected, back then.)

Plus, as it turns out, just straight PHOTOGRAPHS is also exhausting for her, just viewing photos, as well as downloading, editing etc. (Didn't expect this, either.)

So my Mac was freezing, after I shut her down, and restarted: Her boot-up was getting stuck for hours. (Mainly because:
Several months of staying awake, including very exhausting work with photos and movie creation, editing.)

And then I destroyed everything with manual shutdowns, while she was freezing.

So I'm sure I destroyed file names etc. but my dam iMovie project should still be just sitting there, lol. So this is why it's still ongoing efforts to recover it.

It was a 20 min. video, several gigs, I'd be happy to even recover part of it, it would still be a lot of content.

I feel like now I need to figure out what exactly would be the best way to recover it, seeing that my own Mac seems almost unable to look at it.

Maybe the local compute shop can let me rent a machine to use myself, maybe lol. Maybe they have something perfect that I can plug it into and just get everything back.







I think I had a bit of personal photos of my cats, too, so I'd like to recover that, too.

(I mean, actually, my first response was... slowly trying all the MANY different safe modes / recovery modes / repair modes etc. which are built into macOS.

Because when the glitched hdd was still my Mac's internal hdd, I could get several such modes to run successfully, although I couldn't get through the normal boot-up.

So I spent a few months messing with the different recovery modes etc., and texting / calling Apple support... and I visited the Apple store twice, and finally determined that I just had to replace the hdd, so I did that, and got my Mac running again, with the glitched drive now an external hdd.

So I was successful with all of that, after a long time learning as I went through it, and Apple support actually kept suggesting entirely different things to try lol.

So that was success, but then I never determined what exactly would be the best recovery method, after Photorec didn't get everything.

I made a thread on Apple's forum but it didn't help either.

And the most recent thing was buying that thunderbolt cable, which is at least a tangible improvement with my situation here lol.

Tbc, I'm going to talk to the computer shop again soon...)