Circle with a Slash Through it and Non-Mounting Hard Drive

SokrMan wrote:

The volume C948DC54-AFC3-4E89-81C5-518FEBD8E2AB was found corrupt and can not be repaired.

Problems were encountered during repair of the partition map

First off, thanks for being so detailed it saves a lot of trouble.

What has occured is your GUID partition map has become corrupted, this small hidden section on the drive is responsible for telling the hardware what and sizes of the partitions are on that drive. (OS X Lion, Lion Recovery and EFI)

The only way to rebuild the partition map is to erase and reformat the ENTIRE drive, including the hidden Lion Recovery Partition (which you booted into (Command R) to use Disk Utility to try to repair the drive.) Obviously this can't be done from the same drive booted from.

Unfortunatly with OS X 10.7 Apple didn't provide OS X install disks to install OS X onto a external drive or to boot from to perform the complete erase and reformat of the entire drive.

However if you have a blank powered external drive and a fast, reliable Internet connection (AppleID and password), you can Command R boot into Lion Recovery, format the external drive (Disk Utility: Partition: Options: GUID, Format: OS X Ext. J) and then install Lion from Apple's servers onto the external drive.

Once you have that, reboot holding the Option key down (wired keyboard) and select the external drive to boot from. Once you go through setup, try to grab your files off the internal drive.

(DataRescue can be used to recover deleted or corrupt file structure files directly from the 1's and 0's on the drive itself, it's $99, but a option if for some reason you can't do it manually via drag and drop)

Once you have all your files off the machine (make another copy to another drive and disconnect that drive), use Disk Utility (booted on the external drive, it's in the Utilities folder) to select the entire internal drive (drive makers name and size) and perform a Erase with Security Option Zero All Data. This will take a few hours so wait it out. What this will do is force 0's to every bit on the drive, if the hardware detects a bad sector it will map that bad sector off. (I suspect you have a failed sector in your GUID parititon map.)

Once that's complete, check the Partition tab: that Options is GUID and Format is OS X Extended (j)

Now if you have a newer Mac, if you reboot normally (no external drive connected) the Mac itself should install either the Lion Recovery Partition or combined with OS X all by itself over the Internet, I haven't seen or done this yet, so you'll be poineering this aspect. If you get Lion Recovery, then simply boot into it (Command R) and install Lion onto the Lion Partition.

Then go about installing all your apps first, then create a same named user as the old one (different password is fine) if you didn't use the same name as before, and then connect the external drive and transfer your contents of your User file folders (Music, Pictures, Movies etc) into their same name folders on the new setup, don't change anything, just select all and drag and drop, replace. By using the same user name, it preserves your itunes playlists and other data that depends upon correct user pathnames to the secondary files. If you start moving things around you'll lose the pathnames to your secondary files (songs). If your permissions are off, Finder: Get Info to set all (including down inside folders) to your new username.

If Internet Recovery doesn't work, option boot from the external drive and download Carbon Copy Cloner (free to use, donations accepted) and learn how to clone both your Lion Recovery Partition and OS X Lion Partition back onto your internal drive.

http://www.bombich.com/

https://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

If by some chance you don't have a fast, relaible Internet connection your going to have ot take your machine to someplace that does, or have Apple fix the mess they caused by not supplying boot disks.

You can opt to buy the $69 Lion USB thumb drive, you can option boot off of that and perform the same functions above onto a external drive to boot from and recover your files.

Assuming at this point you have OSX Lion on a external drive and the computer with DataRescue booted from it.

Does DataRescue have the ability to try to recover anything from the entire internal drive?

You will need another blank external drive to send the output too, it will be quite substancial but the object is to get everything off of it and pick through the mess later. 🙂

I don't have any other options beyond this but a high end $$$ data recovery service like DriveSavers. 😟

By the way, did you by any chance tried to install Linux? 🙂

I might have a solution, but I think you'll need the $69 Lion USB first.

Did you have bootcamp?

SokrMan wrote:

it just finds three partitions - one is a fat partion and the other two are about 618mb.

there are three partitions on a regular Lion drive.

EFI which is small (likely 618MB) and likely appears to have no data

OS X Lion (takes up the most space)

(Bootcamps here if installed will make four total partitions)

Lion Recovery Partition (small, about 618 mb)

Unfortunately, the main partition with all the data doesn't show up but I know it's still there since it shows up in disk utility..

Disk Utility does a good job by reading the drive, likely so it can repair the partition map.

Why doesn't DataRescue not read the entire drive of all possibly recoverable data, that's what it's supposed to do regardless what the partition map says.

So look for that option, 99% of the data recovered should be OS X Lion and thus your files.

Another option may be to download the free to use Carbon Copy Cloner to the booted external drive, then use that to clone the OS X Lion partition (or the entire drive) to another blank external drive, then try to access that using the Finder or Data Rescue again.

CCC has a very low level block clonining ability that might work to image the whole drive.

Worth a shot anyway, I'm running out of bullets. 🙂