Fixing a Mac hard drive. On the OSX system, the SMART tool is in charge of checking that the hard drive is in good condition. Among various other functions, it detects defective areas on a damaged hard drive. When you encounter a problem, there are many tools you can use, including Ontrack EasyRecovery. We have written some instructions on. Feb 03, 2020 Disconnect any external storage devices from your Mac. Choose Apple menu About This Mac, then click Storage. If you see a drive labeled Fusion Drive, your Fusion Drive is working and this article doesn't apply to you. If you have a Fusion Drive that has been split, you should see two drives. If you don't have a Time Machine backup, or the drive that is broken is your Time Machine backup, you may need to take a different route, and that may involve using a disk repair tool. Apple has a disk repair tool built right into the Mac, called Disk Utility, and it's worth trying to use Disk Utility before paying for a data recovery tool.
Hard Drive Issues on a Mac – A Rarity, but a Pain Nonetheless
- You suspect a problem with the hard drive. Before panic sets in, you want to launch Apple's Disk Utility and select Repair Disk from the First Aid tab. Hopefully, that will remedy the situation.
- Apr 08, 2014 How to determine if your Mac's hard drive is failing. There are various ways you can see if your Mac's drive is on its way out. April 8, 2014 4:47 p.m.
Earlier this week I received a call from a local business client who was having problems publishing a self-maintained website for their store. Although my service call began with troubleshooting a problematic website, the situation promptly escalated to showing symptoms of a serious hardware issue.
At first it seemed like the Macbook Pro owner's issues were purely related to iWeb and needing to be properly configured for their web hosting account. It wasn't long before I discovered that her Mac was having issues accessing files from its hard drive. And that's when it happened…
Upon a system restart, the Mac would not boot past the initial gray screen with Apple logo, spinning wheel and frozen progress bar.
It was quite obvious the computer was not successfully accessing its operating system files but it was too early yet to be sure whether it was due to mechanical issues with the hard drive or motherboard, missing or corrupted files stored on the hard drive. I was going to have to narrow it down before making a diagnosis that could cost the client unnecessary data loss, expenses for hardware or labor.
I would suggest the following steps that I tried prior to assuming a hard drive failure:
1. Attempt to repair your system drive using Disk Utility.
Obviously if you are stuck at the gray screen of agony, booting past it isn't an option. But you can boot from your system disc labeled Mac OS Install DVD. To do so, pop it into your optical drive and hold the Alt/Option key while you power up the computer. Keep holding it til you see your boot drive options and then click the Mac OS Install DVD to boot from it. Once past the language selection, you can access utilities from the top menu. Disk Utility is the one you want. When it opens, click on your hard drive in the left column sidebar and the click Verify Disk followed by Repair Disk under First Aid. If your computer completes its process, then it might just be your lucky day. You should now initiate a normal restart to see if your problem has been resolved. But if your situation is like mine, you might get failures indicating the hard drive is unreadable. Pass go, but do not collect $200.
2. If you DON'T have a Mac OS install DVD OR you DO have access to another Mac and a firewire cable, try booting in Target Disk Mode.
This is when you boot your afflicted machine as though it was an external drive to a healthy Mac. To do so, first turn on your sick Mac while holding down the T key and you will see a gray screen with a large occasionally moving Firewire logo. You can now connect the two computers via firewire cable and boot the healthy computer while holding the Alt/Option key as described above. Your sickly computer's hard drive in target disk mode should appear as a boot option on your healthy computer. Choose it and proceed. If you are able to boot to it successfully, you can try again to run Disk Utility from Applications->Utilities and to verify/repair the hard drive. If this works without a hitch, again try and reboot your computer normally to see if your problem has been solved. If not, keep reading.
3. This option is the one that surprisingly worked for me: Boot into Mac Safe Mode while showing its progress in a command line UI.
Your Mac will automatically attempt some more gloves-come-off disk repair measures when you boot into safe mode.
To start up into standard Safe Mode (to Safe Boot), do this:
- Be sure your Mac is shut down.
- Press the power button.
- Immediately after you hear the startup tone, hold the Shift key. The Shift key should be held as soon as possible after the startup tone, but not before the tone.
- Release the Shift key when you see the gray Apple icon and the progress indicator (looks like a spinning gear).
To start up into Safe Mode with display of the progress in a command line UI, do the same as above EXCEPT hold the Command and V keys along with Shift.
In my case this process worked and I was able to boot into safe mode with the affected computer. You can now restart the computer as normal and you will likely be able to boot now, possibly after a brief progress bar display during bootup. If this works for you, you should still be concerned! Even though your computer is working seemingly normally, you should consider yourself blessed (I don't do luck). If you've found my advice helpful so far, heed my next directive: use your extra life to immediately make an entire Time Machine backup onto a reliable clean external hard drive. You will need this if/when your hard drive crashes if you want to recover your documents and/or applications.
If none of the above worked for you, it may be time to bring out the big guns if you really need to save your data.
4. Try an advanced data recovery software such as DiskWarrior or Disk Drill.
Mac Internal Hard Drives
Short of sending your hard drive to an expensive data recovery specialist, this might be your last resort for a DIY fix. These solutions may require you to remove your hard drive, use a live boot cd or target disk mode. You should refer to their respective developer's website for a thorough outline of the process.
In Conclusion and in Summary
In any case, there is a reason your hard drive is having these issues. Replacing your hard drive very soon should be your plan especially if you have a hard drive more than 3 years old and you don't have a strong hunch that you caused your own issue in any way. Ultimaker firmware update.
My Recommended Hard Drive Purchase to Fix or Upgrade Your Macbook
I recommend Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM hard drives and I use them in my own and client's machines. Replacing my original Hitachi hard drive (which had incidentally NOT failed, but was critically full at only 160GB) truly breathed new life into my Macbook Pro. Not only did it provide tons more storage space for me, but the 7200RPM performance and larger 16MB cache has greater responsiveness and performance.
- 500GB Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM Hard Drive – Price Check (The one that I chose for my 2007 Macbook Pro)
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Hi, my 4-year-old MacBook Pro has died (Model A1260). The people at the Apple Store have confirmed that it's a dead logic board. I have some important files on the computer that were not backed up. How can I retrieve these files? Preferably, I'd like to be able to access these files on a PC, but if need be, I can borrow my friend's iMac to do the transfer. Thanks!
Unlike external devices, internal hard drives are sturdier and they don't run into problems as often as flash drives. But they don't last forever. Sometimes, they tend to get corrupted and you will suffer from data loss. It is not easy to recover files from hard drives on a Mac computer which is functioning well.
If you need to transfer files from a broken Mac to a new Mac, things would become more complex. In this article, we will talk about that. Usually, there are two accassions:
- 1. If you only have the unbootable Mac.
- 2. If you have two Macs.
Tutorial to transfer files from broken Mac to new Mac
Mac Broken Hard Drive
Cisdem pdf creator 7 1 0 3. iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is free Mac hard drive data recovery software which has helped lots of users transfer documents, pictures, audios, videos, emails that files from broken Mac to new Mac, recover lost data from dead MacBook Pro/MacBook Air/iMac, recover lost data from unbootable Mac computer, recover lost data from failed internal Mac hard drive, etc.
There is no need to take out the broken Mac internal HD. You are allowed to create a bootable USB and recover lost data or run the software through iBoysoft Server.
Apple Mac Hard Drive
Solution 1: If you have only one unbootable Mac computer
If you have only one computer at your hand, the best solution you can try is to run iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac through iBoysoft Server to recover lost data.
Cad modeling software. Note: To perform the steps below, please make sure you can boot your problematic Mac into Internet Recovery Mode. That's to say, you need to connect it to a network, such as a WIFI network.
- 1. Restart your Mac and press Command +Option +R key combinations to boot into macOS Recovery mode.
- 2. Choose a network for your Mac. You need to make your Mac connected to the Internet all the time.
- 3. Click Utilities in the top menu and select Terminal from the drop-down menu.
- 4. Type in the command line below:
- and then press Enter. This will launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac through iBoysoft Server.
- 5. When iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is launched, select the Mac hard drive in the list and click on Next to scan for files on this drive.
- 6. Select the files you want to get back and preview them, and then click on 'Recover' to recover them.
Solution 2: If you have two Macs
- 1. Download iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on another Mac computer.
- 2. Install and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on the healthy Mac computer.
- 3. Click iBoysoft Data Recovery on the menu bar and then select 'Create Boot Drive'.
- 4. Insert a USB drive into the healthy Mac computer.
- 5. Follow the wizard to create a bootable recovery drive on the USB drive.
- 6. When the creation process completes, you can insert the USB drive into the unbootable Mac computer, and then press the Power button and Option key (⌥) to start the Mac.
- 7. Select iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac from the boot options.
Note: If you're running macOS Mojave or earlier, iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac will launch immevdiately when your Mac boots up. But, if your Mac is running macOS Catalina, you need two additional steps to launch this program.
- 8. Wait for your Mac to boot up, open 'Terminal' application from 'Utilities' drop-down menu.
- 9. Run the following command:
- 10. Follow the wizard to scan for the lost data on the corrupted internal hard drive, choose the files you want to get back, and then click Recover button.
How to fix a broken Mac computer?
After transferring files from broken Mac to new Mac, you can reformat the system disk and reinstall macOS to make it usable again.
- 1. Boot your Mac to macOS Recovery mode: hold down Command + R keys immediately after pressing the power button to turn on your Mac, release the keys until you see the Apple logo.
- 2. Select Disk Utility from the macOS Utilities menu.
- 3. Select the broken system drive from the side bar.
- 4. Click on Erase from the top.
- 5. Setup the required information to reformat the disk and click Done when finished.
- 6. Go back to macOS Utilities screen and select Reinstall macOS.
