Mac drives · case closed · NTG-2025-1771
Ten Minutes of Waiting, and She Pulled the Cable.
Ten minutes of that coloured wheel going round
, one morning, and she pulled the cable, certain the Mac had hung
. Twice more she tried; the Backup Plus never turned up anywhere at all
. She teaches piano around Hinckley for a living, and the drive went out to lessons in a car boot and came home the same way. What it carried was eleven years of pupil recordings, the ones they take away with them, and no other set of them existed.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
0115 8220606
What went wrong, and why.
Until the whole catalogue has been read through, a Mac puts no volume on the desktop, and hers happened to lie over a weakening stretch of surface. So it was the disk that took ten minutes and not the computer: a request for one sector, a refusal, the request repeated, and repeated again, with the Finder waiting patiently behind it. Then the instinct kicks in — out with the cable, back in, once more — and every one of those goes takes the heads back over the frailest ground on that platter. Something that answers slowly this month may not answer at all by the next.
The bench work this one took.
How the work runs →| Kit on the bench | What it did on this job | Why we reach for it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Copied at a pace we set, and no operating system was allowed near the volume | One platter side per pass, with the heads mapped before a single sector is taken off, and the resets, the timeouts and the power all held under our control |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | HFS+ put back together off the image, with the catalogue whole | Reads APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs where other tools give up |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Into service mode, and the weak band underneath was mapped | Reaches the maker's own service mode, which standard ATA commands cannot |
What happened on the bench.
Logged in, then kept clear of every computer on the premises
As soon as it was logged, the Seagate went onto bench hardware, and after that nothing carrying an operating system was allowed to touch it. Service mode answered at once. A band of sectors was failing and getting wider, and it lay directly across the region where HFS+ keeps its catalogue. There is the ten-minute wait, and there is the morning no volume appeared.
Catalogue first, audio second, nothing rushed
Order mattered here more than speed did. First off, slowly and with retries kept short, came the catalogue and the metadata — a few small regions which between them supply the pupil, the date and the lesson number for every file. Audio followed. And on the question she had been carrying around with her: unplugging it had made nothing worse.
The Seagate was never repaired. Its image was
No repair was attempted on the drive itself; the finished image is what every operation ran against. Reverse those two steps and eleven years turns up as an unnamed heap rather than as folders sorted by pupil and by year. Names, dates and structure came back with the audio.
What was returned.
Folders came back exactly as she had arranged them, and nothing was signed off until she had sat down and played lessons from three years either side of the fault. Nine are incomplete. All nine of them sit in the worst of that band, and each is identified by name in the report.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
Other Apple jobs in the casebook.
Sounds like yours? Switch it off before anything else.
£250 + VAT covers a card or a USB stick; a single drive is £300 + VAT; RAID and NAS start from £500 + VAT. Nothing is charged for the first look, and a fixed figure reaches you in writing before any chargeable work begins. Switch the device off, leave it alone, and post it in. On most jobs, no data back means no fee.