Recovery Time

Happy Returns

After a week at the seaside I returned home and immediately had computer problems. My trusty laptop who's hard drive I'd suspected being on the verge of failing, finally let go. I was in the process of trying to backup my data at the time when it repeatedly failed at the same file. So I ran a disk repair... diskutility reported a B Tree error, recommended I backed up my data, and then seemed unable to remount the disk. GREAT, how was I supposed to do that now?

I have a new disk on order, a Sandisk 480Gb Extreme SSD which has a read speed of 540MB/s and a write of 460Mb/s. That's nearly as fast as the mSATA card I installed in the new server. I'm looking forward to having faster access, longer battery life and hopefully better stability.

Not So Stellar

In the mean time I downloaded and installed Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery. Initially it was just the free version, but when you see your apparently fine files listed you feel the impulse to grab your credit card and purchase a full license. So, I left it churning away for 24 hours, happily pulling hundreds of Gb of files off the damaged disk. Sadly when I tested them yesterday they all turned out to be garbage.

I've powered down the machine and restarted the attempt, but after 12 hours it's still reading the disk with not a file in sight. Yikes, this might be harder than I'd thought!

I'll just have to swap the disk out, stick it into a caddy and work on it later. I need the laptop working again, apart from everything else I use it to type blogs with!! I can't cope with just an ipad because I still use an ipod nano for audio books and podcasts, and I really need a proper keyboard and decent processing power for photo editing.