Need help!! A friend of mine has a MBP running El Capitan I suspect the hard drive is failing ...

[G+_Eddie Silva]

Need help!! A friend of mine has a MBP running El Capitan. I suspect the hard drive is failing. I tried to back it up but the drive kept failing. Nothing worked (disk permissions, ect) so I reformatted it and reinstalled El Capitan (no easy feat, again because I think the hard drive is failing). My friend knows nothing about backups (until now). All her photos were on the drive. I could not conventionally save them. Is there a way to use recovery software to recover the photos?

 

Originally she said she was fine if the photos were not recovered but now that I've reinstalled the operating system. Is that possible? That's the reason why I installed the os.

 

Symptoms of the hard drive failure that I'm suspecting. It's mac OS X El Capitan. She was able to log in to her desktop but the computer would stop responding. She brought it to me but we couldn't log into her desktop only saw the login screen. Then the computer restarted in its own and would not get past the startup grey apple logo and startup sound. Under my own diagnostics using disk utility it staid the disk could not be repaired, repair failed. Is that a hard drive starting to go?

 

Thanks for any help.

[G+_Ben Reese]

If it's an HDD, you can probably recover the files. If it's SSD, they're probably gone forever (though maybe something could be found).

 

I'm not real familiar with Mac drive format, but I've recovered data from a few Windows drives - NTFS and FAT32. Surely there are tools for Mac too.

[G+_Eddie Silva]

Looks like I'll be able to use data rescue 4. Hoping for the best. Now all I need is to find my license code.

[G+_Eddie Silva]

It's times like this I hate delivering bad news that I don't get involved with data corruption.

[G+_Ben Reese]

Also a good time to recommend CrashPlan to your friend to prevent future data loss.

 

Which reminds me that there are people I know who could really benefit from a good backup option. Also, Flickr + Google Photos + Amazon Prime photos wouldn't be a bad suggestion.

 

Good luck getting the data back! I would feel sick if I lost all my home photos and videos!

[G+_Eddie Foy]

Drive Genius. 

Plus it has an extra program that monitors plist entries (windows registry equivalent) and gives a pop-up warning to allow/deny. that and Little Snitch makes me feel kinda safe.

[G+_Eddie Silva]

Thanks guys. I'm running data rescue 4 on it. So far only 34 slow reads which equal probable drive failure. But now it's reading like a champ. I'm doing a deep read to see if it can produce anything. Wish me luck!!