How to Recover a Failed Mac Hard Drive With Tools

Any hard drive can fail. While hard drives are precision electronic components, they have moving parts and the storage media cannot be perfect. Hard drives rotate at high speeds, from 4,200 to 9,600 revolutions per minute, with speeds increasing as technology gets better. A hard drive consists of one or more hard discs upon which digital information is stored. Anything from corrupted files to actual flaws in the physical media can cause a hard drive to fail.


Recovering data from an Apple Macintosh computer takes the correct software tools and patience.

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Disk Utility
• Third-party recovery software
• External hard drive

1
Use Disk Utility first. This program comes with each Apple Macintosh computer as part of the system software package. It works to test and repair minor problems from discs, whether they are hard drives, CDs, DVDs or diskettes. You can find it by going to the Applications folder, then to the Utilities folder and double-clicking the program. Note that if the failed hard drive is the start-up disc, you will need to insert the Mac OS disc and restart the Mac while holding down the "C" key. This forces the computer to start from the CD or DVD from which you installed the system originally.

2
Select the hard drive icon from the left panel in Disk Utility. Select First Aid from the five buttons on the top. This will activate two or four buttons on the bottom of the application's window. If the problem hard drive is the start-up disc, you can Verify Disk Permissions or Repair Disk Permissions. If the drive is an external or non-start-up disc, you can select Verify Disk or Repair Disk. Clicking Verify Disk will do a quick check on the selected hard drive and tell you if problems exist. Clicking Repair Disk will allow Disk Utility to try to repair and problems. Because Disk Utility is an unsophisticated program, it usually can only fix minor problems.

3
Select the Restore button in Disk Utility to recover data from the failed hard drive if repairing the disc does not work. Drag the failed drive's icon from the left to the space next to "Source:" and then drag the external hard drive icon--the one where you will move the data to--to the space next to "Destination:" and click the bottom Restore button.

4
Insert the third-party disc utilities CD or DVD into the drive, then restart the Mac holding the "C" key until the image of the apple appears. Do this only if Disk Utility cannot solve the problems. Before running tests on the hard drive, find the software's rescue or restore feature and follow the instructions to save the data from the failed drive to another location, probably the external hard drive.

5
Run the tests on the failed hard drive to find out if it is fixable after you have recovered your data. You may be able to resurrect the failed hard drive if the problems are not too severe.