Macintosh HD won't repair, won't mount, won't boot. Any suggestions for saving data?

If your disk will not mount, you may have be forced to send it to a service to recover the data. You are talking serious bucks for that, read that as $$$$. Is your data worth that much?

It is just such situations as this that I am always saying backup.

Allan

IMHO it is no longer trustworthy.

Allan

Generally means your disk has failed. DiskWarrior or similar is your only hope of recovering data. However, if your drive has failed, other than a data recovery service, there is no way to recover your data. I can't guarantee that DiskWarrier or similar will work. If you have an Apple store nearby, make an appointment. I think your first step is to verify whether your disk has failed or the file structure is hosed. If the later, DiskWarrior may work. If the former, your data is gone unless you want to send the disk off to a data recovery service, which will cost big bucks.

If you maintained two current backups, the fix would be easy, so start doing so.

Apple Support have a good doc on resolving start-up issues. Clearly you've tried some, but if any have been missed from their check list (e.g. trying fsck) may be worth attempting.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1417

DiskWarrior is worth a try if you actually have it, but if you are located near an Apple Store or Apple authorized service they would be good places to go for hands on advice and help, though if the Mac is out of warranty then charges may apply to any service done to resolve problem.

brgm wrote:

Perhaps booting from an external drive and then running 'Data Rescure' or similar on the corrupted HD?

Apple doesn't do data recovery, for that you need to go local service or do it yourself

Create a data recovery/undelete external boot drive

My computer is dead, is my personal data lost?

I was having the same trouble for a week.

I have a Mid 2011 27inch iMac. The hard drive died and I tried fixing it using disk utility by starting up the computer pressing down the Option button. Nothing worked. It said the HD was damaged.

I went to Apple and I asked and they said that there was nothing that could be done. That there are hard drive retrival services but that costs upwards of 800 dollars. What I did instead was buy a Thunderbolt cable. Connected my iMac to my Mac air and started up my iMac holding down the T key.

This turned by iMac into a gigantic hard drive. I then went to the Finder on my Air and my damaged hard drive from the iMac showed up and I was just able to then drag and drop the important files I didn't want to lose into an external hard drive.

I hope that helps.