Can I create a new disc image of my dead internal mac HDD, and put it onto an external 2TB Drive to save my files?

swampert948 wrote:

Can I create a new disc image of my dead internal mac HDD, and put it onto an external 2TB Drive to save my files?

If the internal drive is dead, and is not readable at all, there is no way to use the internal drive to create a new disc image in order to save your files.

Any files that you had stored only on that internal drive are gone. (Barring sending the drive out to a professional data recovery service, which may cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, with no guarantee of success or that the partial jumble of pieces of files that you might get back will be usable.)

Backups must be made before catastrophe happens. Afterwards is too late.

Hi,

I'm pretty certain that my internal 1TB hard drive is dead, I can't find any files when I search for them. If I get an external 2TB hard drive, can I then go into disc utility, file, create new image, blank image and select the external drive in "where", to put an image of the dead drive onto the external drive to save my files?

No. That will just create an empty disc image file on the external drive. If you open that disk image file, that will mount the virtual disk, and you can then copy files to and from that virtual disk.

There are also menu items to create a new disk image from an existing folder or existing volume. Those will both. create a new disk image and populate it with a copy of the data on the source folder or volume.

Is that what this function is for?

No. File > New Image > Blank Image… doesn't copy any data at all. The other two menu items do copy data, but require a source that is readable.

Your picture of Disk Utility shows the internal drive volume is not mounted. It may be encrypted by Filevault. Have you tried to click the "Mount" button? Sometimes the volume may unlock, but not mount, however, Disk Utility will still show a failure and unfortunately will not distinguish between the two events with the error message. If the volume becomes unlocked, then you should see more information about that volume on the right pane of Disk Utility such as the file system used by that volume and its size.

Also, you are viewing the drives as the default "volume" view which hides the physical drive and hidden Containers. Within Disk Utility you need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" before the physical drive & hidden Containers appear on the left pane of Disk Utility. You will want to run First Aid on the physical drive making sure there are no errors remaining. Then you need to run First Aid on the hidden Container until there are no more errors or warnings.

The physical internal drive appears to be present, but the volume containing the file system is just not accessible for whatever reason. We just don't have enough details about your system configuration and what may have preceded this moment.

Whenever I encounter this situations with a client computer, I always want to first check the health of the drive since a failing drive must be handled with care if any data recovery is necessary. Making attempts to recover data from a failing drive will usually make the failure worse.....even to the point a professional data recovery service will be unable to recover any data. There are ways to check the health of a drive of an Intel Mac, but how to do this depends on the exact model of the Mac. With some Macs (2018+ Intel models with T2 security chip), if the internal SSD is inaccessible, then there may be no way to recover any data due to the security features involved.

You can get the exact model of the Mac by entering the system serial number on the check coverage page here (please don't post the serial number on the forums since it is considered personal information):

Check Your Service and Support Coverage - Apple Support

Edit: You can try running the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected. Unfortunately the diagnostics rarely report issues, but it never hurts to check.

If you are not aware of Time Machine that is Apple's tool which is pre-installed on Mac OS and ONLY requires and External Hard Disk to backup to. Please click and read the information in Back up your Mac with Time Machine. For an External Hard Disk many experienced users on these forums use the OWC Mercury Elite Pro due to:

• Reasonable Cost
• VERY high reliability
• Quality of service from the vendor
• When the internal HD dies (as you have learned they all do!) installing a new HD is a 5 minute process that requires 1 screwdriver and really next to no skill.

For most users, the 2 TB version is adequate, however if you tend to store more than 1TB of information on your replacement iMac internal storage then buying a 4 TB may be a better idea.

Some instructions to follow: Use an external SSD as your startup disk … - Apple Community