Hard drive mending with a happy ending

Mijn probleem

Fatal Hard Drive Crash

Mijn oplossing

Smoothly! Done in one hour thanks to the repair guide.

I was seeing red when I first discovered that my disk had crashed, and my ~ 60 GB music collection was lost. After some work and only 80 bucks spent, my old MacBook Pro is once again up and running, with three times more hard drive space than before.

Mijn advies

The hardware reparation was done in one hour, but I spent about five to ten hours recovering the lost data from the old disk. I have nothing to add to the hard drive replacement guide.

Some random experiences from the recovery work:

1 - Make a disk image of the damaged disk using "Disk Utility" before starting the work. This guarantees that you have something to go back to if everything gets messed up.

2 - Different data recovery software works differently. I needed to combine data recovered using "Data Rescue" and "Disk Warrior" to recover everything. Some files that were not recovered by one of them were found by the other, and vice versa. While Data Rescue 3 sorts the recovered files by file type (wav, mp3, flac, etc), Disk Warrior tries to conserve your originial folder structure.

3 - Take backups! ;)