[atakordie]

*Any* help is hugely appreciated!!

The background:

I have a 1TB Seagate drive (barracuda 7200.11) that I think was stuck in the BSY state (like many other seagates), and I did a DIY repair with a DKU-5 cable using a method found on msfn forums. After accessing the drive and "fixing" it, I immediately updated the firmware from Seagate back in February. The drive is one big partition for all data. I run Leopard OS X on my Mac Pro with Windows XP using VMware Fusion. The Seagate drive in question is external (right now, and was when BSY state occurred in January). I access the drive via a SATA/IDE to USB adapter that I have used since the BSY problem. Putting the drive in the Mac can sometimes cause problems, and does not allow me to power cycle the drive at my behest.

The attempts:

In short, I have successfully copied off about 70% of the data onto a fresh 1TB drive. I have done this over months of random times of trying when I have time, and many many power cycles to the drive. The drive will not mount anymore in OS X, though it does show up in Disk Utilities. It did mount at first (in February), but I could not copy ANY files using Finder in OS X. I found a program called Macdrive for Windows that allows explorer to view Mac-formatted volumes. This is how I have accessed the disk to copy much of the data. I've had to power cycle the drive a lot because after several minutes of copying, an I/O error occurs, or the disk stops responding/explorer stops responding. One folder in the directory tree in particular is of importance to me, but I cannot access everything. I have copied some folders within this directory (there are about 150 folders in this one), but now not all of the folders show up. Sometimes after I power cycle the drive, about 60 show up, other times about 100 show up. Very rarely have all of the folders been there, and this is when I can copy. If not all folders show, I get an I/O error when I copy a folder, and only the folder name is copied to the fresh hard disk. What can I do?

Previous methods:

I've used testdisk for mac and windows, but it only gives me "read errors" and if I let it run completely, it seems it would take at least a month or so. I tried ddrescue extensively to clone the seagate to a new 1TB drive, but I couldn't get ddrescue to work, even after about 24 hours of research. ddrescue seems like the best from what I've read about it, but i couldn't get the logfile to work to save the progress, and ddrescue didn't appear to be doing anything other than just scanning (no copying) after leaving it for five days. Diskwarrior and Data Rescue II were tried for mac, but neither worked at all, as this disk will not mount. Other random freeware applications for Windows were tried, but to no avail. I know my files are "there" but I cannot access them or copy them now! I have saved almost 700GB of data, but the last 300GB have the most important pieces (of course). All of the saved data I have gotten is good and true; everything that has been copied off of the bad disk works fine.

Please, offer any suggestions/comments!! I need help, and I have tried working on this for months. What can I do?? :4-dontkno
I will follow your orders ray:

 

[raptor_pa]

Good job fixing the bsy - terminal rocks for fixing Seagates. What version firmware did you update to, the first release had some additional problems and has been replaced, make sure you have the latest for your drive just to be safe.
You can try r-studio to see if it can find the files. Might take a while to scan the drive because it sounds like maybe the issue is the preamp or a weak head. R-studio handle mac file systems well so that would probably be my first hit. You could also try the ddr_help script rather than ddrescue. ddr_help handles errors better, and it may work past the bad reads rather than sending the drive off the deep end. You could also try running the image backward. This eliminates the use of the drives cache and has picked up a lot of sectors that throw errors when reading from 0 to maxLBA. You can do reverse with ddr_help or media tools pro.
Let us know how you get on with it, but at least there are a couple of ideas to try. ddr_help page is here http://vaab.chez.com/utilities/dd_rhelp/index.en.html

 

[atakordie]

Thanks, raptor_pa, I will get on this immediately and report back in several days...

 

[atakordie]

Ok, I used dd_rhelp in Ubuntu to copy the bad hdd to a disk image (a .dmg file) onto another 1 TB seagate disk which just finished less than an hour ago. Except, near completion, the command line informed me of a lack of space on the target drive. I may need to run this again with a 1.5 TB drive perhaps. I attempted to mount the "recovery.dmg" file in OS X, but it gives a warning that says "no mountable file systems" when I double click on it. Are there any secret ways to open a dmg file like this to see if any data is extractable? (recall, I only need about 30% of the drive's ~920 GB of files, since I have the rest backed up already)

 

[raptor_pa]

I've never worked with a .dmg, tho I assume it is simple bitstream image like dd files. Partition find and mount should be able to mount the image or live view http://liveview.sourceforge.net/