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2009 imac hard drive data recovery

Hello, last Friday my imac got stuck on the grey screen/apple logo/spinning gear when I went to restart.

I attempted a restart because any operation I attempted to perform - clicking a link, typing a word - had serious lag time and I could hear a noise it making it hadn't made before. I hadn't backed up in a while, and there's some stuff on there I'd like to recover. So, here I am a week later...


Part 1: Entering Target Disk Mode did not work, or my iMac wouldn't mount through firewire as an external drive. So I removed the internal drive and put it into an external enclosure. It mounted on the MacBook and I could see my Documents folder and everything. I initialized a new Lacie 2TB drive so I could copy everything off of the iMac drive. When I went a few folders into the Documents folder to start to copy stuff onto the Lacie, it froze. After a few minutes the iMac drive was no longer mounted and there was a notice that it was not ejected properly. I restarted the drive, but it no longer would mount. This was very frustrating as I was so close to retreiving my data, and then when I was right there it decided to go fully kaput. Disk Utility can see the iMac drive, but can't repair it - just says I should back-up as much data as I can and then reformat it, which is a catch-22 b/c I can't mount the drive to back-up any of the data. Anyways, I am currently running a Diskwarrior rebuild on the drive. It's in Step 5 and has that "speed reduced by disk malfunction" number going up. I've set the MacBook and it's display to never go to sleep - it already did once, but I woke it back up and Diskwarrior seemed to not miss a step and hopefully that didn't cause a problem - but I've read some people saying it's taken days and in some cases weeks for Step 5 to complete. I won't let it run that long without going to sleep, so I'm probably out of luck in getting into that drive.


My question is, does anyone see anything that I missed or could try differently in the above? Yes, I should have had a current back-up and then I wouldn't be in this position, but here I am. I was so excited when I got the drive to mount that first time in the external enclosure. I'm kicking myself that I should have just dragged and dropped the whole Documents folder onto the new Lacie as soon as I saw it, rather than trying to navigate into sub-folders. Was there anything I could have done to get it to mount again? Should I cancel Diskwarrior and try to mount it on a different computer? Any thoughts would be much appreciated.



Part 2: My currently hard drive-less 2009 iMac... I am unfortunately past the option of getting the HD replaced for free from Apple because of the recall they were doing, so I'd have to purchase a new HD and install. The problem is I've moved recently and I can't for the life of me find the original install disc, nor remember if there ever was one. I have this sinking feeling that if there was one, it got purged in the move by accident.


My question is, is it possible to even install a new HD in the iMac without the install disk? Any thoughts would be much appreciated.


Thanks.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Jan 23, 2014 8:06 AM

Reply
2 replies

Jan 23, 2014 10:08 AM in response to culversgap

Update. ha!


Diskwarrior finished doing its thing. I previewed my recovered drive, and voila, there was my old drive. I am currently moving all important folders over to the Lacie. My Documents folder ended up being in the Recovered Folders folder, which I had to search around for, but I found it.


Lesson. Use Time Machine regularly. If I was, I would have a bootable copy of my computer that I could install to a new HD in my iMac.

2009 imac hard drive data recovery

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