recover data from failed hard drive

Hello vinceg1,

You may find details on the process of transferring files between two Mac computers here, which is what they may be referencing: Transfer files between two Mac computers using target disk mode

While Apple doesn't offer data recovery services for a failed drive, you may try searching for any that are available in your region. Specialists may be able to utilize particular techniques to gather data from drives that have failed. These techniques often require highly specialized tools and machinery and can be very expensive depending on the drive's size and the type of failure. However, data recovery can often access information on drives when data transfer is impossible.

Cheers.

I suppose we should assume that you do not have a backup of any kind and were not using iCloud photo library?

If that's the case, you're looking as potentially spending $$$$ for a professional data recovery service, and that's without any kind of guarantee that they can recover anything...

You may have just learned a very hard life lesson.

Yes, you are damaging the drive further with every attempt to read the data on the drive. Even just having the drive powered on could possibly make the damage worse depending on the failure.

It is possible to leave the drive installed in the Mac while booting from a Linux USB drive/stick to attempt to recover the data. Sometimes it may be better to remove the drive and connect it to a USB adapter, drive dock, or enclosure, but it is possible to leave the drive installed. While your Linux guy may have been able to recover data in 80%+ times, this may unfortunately be one of those 20% times. It really depends on where those 720 bad sectors are located. I'm guessing that even after he clones the drive, that it will be necessary to run a data recovery app on the clone using macOS. While it may be able to recover data, the data may not have any file names associated with it so be prepared to sift through tens of thousands of files. If you have the Linux guy attempt data recovery, just make sure he uses GNU ddrescue and enable the mapping/logging feature. That is the only free open source tool that can possibly do the job. Most Linux distributions have this in their software repositories, but it is important to make sure to use this specific version since there is another utility with the same name (minus the "GNU" part) that is also included in most Linux distribution's software repositories.

Yes, the professional data recovery specialists will need to remove the drive and use expensive specialized equipment & software to attempt to recover the data. Sometimes this expensive equipment & software is needed, but other times it makes no difference. It all depends on the hard drive and the type of failure. With the specialized equipment & software they can turn off one of the drive heads to prevent it from interfering or causing further damage. Some drives (Seagate) will go into a lock down with some failures so the specialized software & equipment are needed to control the drive to get past the lockdown. I've seen some professionals on YouTube videos utilize their expensive software & equipment while also using the same free open source Linux utility that I would use.

They all should end up cloning the failing drive to a good new drive of equal or larger size. It is much easier to work from a healthy clone to finish the recovery process. Sometimes it may be necessary to clone the clone drive if the file system needs to be repaired. You don't want to make a fatal change/mistake on the one good copy of the drive you have. Since the file system and file structure on the clone drive will be incomplete, it is necessary to pull the data to yet another drive. After the data is recovered, then the clone drive will need to be erased so it can be reused.

Yes, you can install and boot macOS from a USB3 SSD and it should be faster than your original internal hard drive. Just keep in mind that the failing internal drive can cause performance issues even while booted to the external drive. If it doesn't cause a problem now, it may in the future as the drive failure gets worse or interfere with booting from the external drive. There may be some ways to prevent macOS from accessing the internal drive while booting so it does not interfere with macOS or prompt you about the drive, but sometimes a drive failure will prevent the Mac from being able to communicate at all with the external drive.

FYI, 32GB is not large enough. A macOS boot drive needs to have at least 20GB of free storage space available at all times for the normal operation of macOS. Also, your iMac can use up to macOS 11.x Big Sur. Big Sur requires at least 36GB of free storage space to install (45GB or so if installing from Internet Recovery Mode or bootable USB installer).

How to create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

i use a windows program called Recuva to recover deleted files, might work for this if you can install the app (use the free trial of crossover)

if that is too complicated, look for mac alternatives (alternativeto.net is my favourite to find software alternatives, might be work a look at if this is the route you want to go down)

You need to be extremely careful here as you can make the drive failure worse where even an expensive professional data recovery service would be unable to recover any data.

Depending on the severity of the hard drive failure most normal apps (even data recovery apps) will not work because they are not able to handle the errors produced by a failing drive. Even macOS is not able to handle these errors. macOS is not the correct choice for recovering data from a failing hard drive. Failed attempts will make the drive failure even worse and will cause data loss. Run DriveDx and post the complete DriveDx text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which I can examine to see how bad the failure is.

I have successfully recovered data from hundreds of failing hard drives (some of them with severe failures), but it takes extreme care to do data recovery. Plus you will only get one chance because the attempt will most likely kill the hard drive permanently. I don't consider myself a professional in data recovery, but I am an advanced amateur. Professionals actually have access to expensive equipment and software which can aid in recovering the data more safely. You will need a USB3 hard drive that is of equal or larger size, plus access to another storage device to store any files able to be recovered. The first thing that needs to be done is to perform a low level clone of the failing drive using a special utility which is able to ignore the errors and concentrate on recovering the good parts of the drive before attempting to recover data on the bad parts of the drive. Even after this, the clone may need to be repaired before being able to access any files and a data recovery app may also be needed. You do not want to make any modifications to the source drive, and this is especially important with a failing drive. I can provide instructions if interested, but only after seeing the DriveDx report. My instructions involve using a Linux boot disk as well as a command line utility (a lot of professionals may also use this free utility).

You should seriously consider a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers or Ontrack. Both vendors provide free estimates and both vendors are recommended by Apple and other OEMs.

You have only one chance at recovering your data, so choose wisely.

You should always have frequent and regular backups of your computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data.

Thanks for posting the drive's health report. The failure is severe since there are currently 720 sectors pending reallocation while 48 have already been reallocated.

I highly recommend contacting a professional data recovery service such as the ones I linked to in my other post. I can guarantee you that no data recovery app or even macOS will be able to help you recover the data. My own method of using Linux and the free command line utility will even be questionable if it will succeed especially for someone's first time attempting data recovery with it on such a bad hard drive. While I can provide basic instructions, there is a lot that a person needs to decide on their own by watching & noticing what is happening to everything during the recovery process. Plus it is very easy to make a mistake and destroy the data you are trying to recover. Like I said, you will only get one chance to attempt data recovery, so if a mistake is made your data will be lost (it may already be lost due to the high number of sectors pending reallocation because that number will likely quickly increase during the data recovery attempt).

A professional data recovery service is your best option here. Power off the iMac immediately and don't power on the drive again so you don't make the failure any worse.