Re: [PLUG] Apple MAC recovery

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

On Tuesday, September 30, 2003, at 10:24 PM, Will Dyson wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 21:24, Jesse Huestis wrote:
> > Hi All:
> >
> > I have a client with a MAC OS 10.x and they have seriously crashed.
> >  Normally, I would take the hard drive and put it in a Linux or Evil
> > empire computer and recover the data they needed.  Has anyone taken a
> > MAC drive  and put it successfully into a Linux box and been able to
> > recover data?
>
> OS X computers use the HFS+ filesystem. A linux kernel driver for that
> filesystem exists and is part of the current 2.4 kernels. The old HFS
> driver will not work with these new filesystems.
>
> The debian package hfsplus contains userspace tools for accessing HFS+
> filesystems.
>
> If the filesystem itself is badly corrupted, you probably won't have
> much luck with either of those tools. In that case, your best bet would
> be to make a sector copy of the filesystem with dd (in case of 
> screwups)
> and then attempt to repair it on another mac using apple's disk repair
> or Norton (I heard a rumor there was a better HFS repair util than
> Norton, but I don't know what it might be).

Depending upon the problems involved... If the disk will mount.

1- Run Apple's Disk Utility - select first aid.
(This requires that the disk actually mount.)

If the disk won't mount use one of these tools, be certain to use the 
OSX versions as the earlier OS 9 versions are "problematic."

1- Disk Warrior (Alsoft.com) -- this does the absolutely best job of 
recovering the catalog if it becomes corrupted. It will succeed where 
all of the other utilities fail. (It also optimizes the catalog if it 
gets fragmented.)

2- TechTool Pro (Micromat.com) and Drive 10.  Drive 10 will recover the 
munged label records and tree information which prevents Apple's disk 
utility from running. And then applies the same fixes. TechTool Pro 
does not yet exist for OS X. (Ignore the website, it is not shipping 
yet.) Drive 10 is basically for OS X what TechTool Pro was for OS 9.... 
a bootable CD in that particular OS.
The functionality of the two are pretty similar.

3- Data Rescue (prosoftengineering.com -- formerly wildbits) Will 
actually recover virtually any data found on the disk! (including 
long-ago erased files.) HOWEVER, you then have to figure out what it is 
and where to put it. It is a tool with out peer, however. NOTHING short 
of a service like Drive Savers can pull rabbits out of the hat like it 
can.  But it is a LOT of work to use it.

4- Norton Utilities -- are a disaster with OS X. Do NOT use them. It 
corrupts the file system and destroys data. The problems are well known 
and documented, have been around since OS X came out, and have not yet 
been fixed (as of August).

The usual routine I use is to run or try to run:
 1- Apple Disk utility
 2- Drive 10
 3- Tech tool pro V 3/3.5 (booted from its CD it boots into OS 9 and V3 
- which knows about OS X HFS+ file systems. But there are updates to 
3.5)
 4- Disk Warrior

Note that Drive 10, TechTool and Disk Warrior all come on bootable CDs.
I keep a bootable fire-wire drive around with them installed on it.


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
# Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg
# Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg
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magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
magill@mac.com

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