# iMac can't find hard drive



## drhowarddrfine (Dec 31, 2014)

This is not necessarily, entirely a Mac question, it's a hardware question, but I'll go through the whole story, or you can scroll to the end to get to my question.

I know some of you guys use Macs with FreeBSD so I thought I'd take a stab in the dark that someone here has come across this problem and fixed it.

My son has an iMac from around 2009, or maybe 2011. The one with a 27-inch screen. He went out of town for a few days leaving his computer on. When he came back and tried to bring his screen up, it showed a progress bar, as if it was updating something, stuck at 50%. Rebooting the computer didn't change that.

I don't know much of anything about iMacs so I Google'd around and found how to access the disk utility with Cmd+R and tried to do a verify on the HD drive and another one which I forgot the name of. The utility said the HD drive wasn't formatted properly, I think. The other drive just said it was locked and couldn't be tested.

Then we tried the main drive which came back quickly saying the volume was OK. So he rebooted and, this time, only get the folder with the question mark which I've come to learn means it can't find the operating system.

So then we reset the PRAM but that solved nothing and, now, we hear the disk drive clicking every so often and that's never good.

He took it to the Apple store tonight where they ran diagnostics but that only showed the computer could not find any hard drive. They're leaving it for tomorrow to do more testing to see if the hard drive is bad, a cable, or something else.

So the usual stupid part of this is that he didn't back up everything he should back up despite my years of persistent warnings that days like today will eventually happen. I've read some places that people have brought drives back to life by booting from the original boot disk and unplugging the drive or checking to make sure the main drive is still selected as the boot drive but I would think the Apple folk would know to try these things.

If someone has any experience or knowledge of what to try to revive or retrieve data off this disk, I'd appreciate knowing what to try.

*My real question, however, is this:* should he come home from the Apple store with a new drive in his system and the old drive in his hand, does anyone know the best way to try and retrieve data off that disk? I'm hoping I can plug it into one of my boxes here at home but, more importantly, I have to hope I can get it to spin up at all.


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## Uniballer (Dec 31, 2014)

Some years ago (before TimeMachine) my wife had a disk problem on her iMac.  As any of you who are married well knows, this quickly became my problem.  I wound up sticking the disk in a suitable USB enclosure, and reading files off of it with HFS+ reader software on a Windows XP system.  I didn't love it, but it worked.  It should be even easier to read them with the iMac itself if you can get the disk to come up in the USB enclosure.  I would trust the OSX filesystem tools more than some third-party stuff for trying to rebuild a damaged file system.  It might also be possible to run some of the Linux data recovery software to copy the entire disk to a new one and connect that to the iMac via USB.  Good luck.


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## drhowarddrfine (Dec 31, 2014)

Uniballer said:


> As any of you who are married well knows, this quickly became my problem.


In fact, I am being blamed, at least in part, for causing the problem. When I had him try a few things I read on the Apple tech support board, clearing pram and verifying the disk, things started getting worse. So I'm to blame for that. It's my fault. (I know he's just frustrated but he pissed me off.)

I saw some things online like the rest of your post and, if Apple can't come up with something today, I'm hoping to come up with some way to read it on my system at home cause he's in Chicago and I'm in St. Louis.

Shouldn't I be able to plug his drive into my FreeBSD box, with a SATA connection, and be able to pull data off it with our tools?


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## Uniballer (Dec 31, 2014)

As far as I know there is no support for the HFS+ file system on FreeBSD.  I can't really tell if this wiki reference is up to date or not.

It is possible that the sysutils/dd_rescue port might help by making an effort to clone a partially unreadable disk.  Are there any other general disk recovery tools for FreeBSD?


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## wblock@ (Dec 31, 2014)

sysutils/hfsexplorer claims to handle HFS+.


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## drhowarddrfine (Dec 31, 2014)

So Apple finished diagnostics on the drive and conclude it's dead. Their statement was it was like a home remodeler showed up to work on a house and there was no house. 

Last I heard, it was spinning so I'll have him ship it to me cause I'm not one to give up so easily. If it spins, I should be able to find a tool to read it.


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## Uniballer (Dec 31, 2014)

I once had a 500GB Seagate hard drive at work that was damaged by a failing power supply.  A bunch of the components near the power connector were toasted and a few traces were vaporized (MOBO and DVD drive were also smoked, but the CPU and RAM were OK).  I did a little research on repairing the drive, and decided to buy the exact same PC board for the drive on ebay.  I tried it on the drive and it would not spin up, but after I desoldered the firmware EEPROM from the original board and soldered it on the replacement board it worked great.  It turned out that there was nothing critical on the drive that had not been backed up before failure.  I stuck that drive in a PC that acts as a client to an order processing system (so it is just an OS and some software - nothing to lose).


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## tingo (Jan 2, 2015)

FWIW, I used recoverdisk(1) on my FreeBSD workstation to create an image of a HFS+ harddrive. Next, I copied the image to an external drive which I connected to a Mac, and ran hfsexplorer on that machine to extract the data I wanted. Worked nicely.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jan 3, 2015)

Could you just plug the drive into your SATA port and do that?


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## petrek (Jan 3, 2015)

Recently I had a problem with one of my disks, PC couldn't see it at all any more, so I plug it through USB and it worked, I was able to copy the contents from it. Maybe one more thing, sometimes putting it in a different position (like upside down) helps a lot, gravity can sometimes be your greatest friend in such cases.


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