The Epic Story of MCC Data Recovery.

Who would have thought the computer guy who hears the "My hard drive crashed, I've lost everything, can you help me?" sob story on a regular basis, would have that problem. But geez, it happened.

Muscle Car Calendar project was a blast. We worked Friday nights for a year to put together the coolest Muscle Car slideshows set to rock music, ever.  When it was done, we mastered the files to DVD, made a few hundred copies, and I stored all the files onto one hard drive. At the time it was backed up to an external drive.  But I forgot to back it up once I changed to a new computer, and I didn't copy it to the new computer, I always figured I could go back to the finished DVD's for recovery, so who cares!  Took the old drive out, and shelved it.

2 years go by and we decide to sell the videos on iTunes or the web or such, so I grab the old hard drive that's labeled MCC and I drop it into an external sled to get the data off, and WHAMMO! Click of Death. EEEKS! Crap. Bummer. I'm bumming. Yes, the classic IBM Deskstar click brrrr click brrr click brrr.

http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery-ibm-deskstar-hard-disk-drive.htm

What to do! We don't have budget for data recovery. We can barely afford more beer. Muscle car guys have their priorities.

Well, I put it away for 6 months. Didn't want to think about it. Then, when I finally had the courage to try again, I hooked it up to another external. Same deal. Click of death. The new OSX Mac Snow Leopard 10.6 was no different than my Leopard 10.5 system had been. Bummer. Time to give up? No way, MCC is at stake.

But I can't figure out why the drive only clicks when it's connected to the computer. Doesn't make sense! If the drive is broken you would think the click would happen all the time, but that wasn't the case. The drive would sit and whirrr without incident if there wasn't a Mac connected. As soon as you connect a Mac, the click starts. So, on a whim, I connect the drive to my daughter's Ubuntu Netbook.

Guess what? NO Click! Umm. ok.

Holy cow, it reads the drive! I can see the files! Yippee! Game over right?

Uh wait.

The MCC folder is empty. Uhhh. What? I see all the folders, and there are stupid client files and junk I don't care about, but the MCC folder is empty! Did I delete the files but can't remember? Uhhh. No. Not possible. So I terminal to the directory and run "ls -lart" to see what's under the hood. And voila, there are all the files, in the MCC folder…

Uhhh. Ok. So the OSX GUI sees an empty folder, but the files are actually there. Never trust the finder.

Try to copy them with a command like "cp -r /TheDamnFilesAreHere/Iswear/ /goHere/U/Dumb/Files" but I get an I/O error. Can't copy the files.

Give up? NO.

I found a program called 'dd_rescue' which copies the data from the fubar hard drive, to another drive, as an .img file, so I can run data recovery applications on a 'safe copy'. Cool application, it doesn't fret the I/O errors when copying the data, it just keeps moving if there is a delay of a few seconds, and it apparently does some voodoo magic to help fill in the missing bits and bytes. Whatever. It worked. It created an .img file. Cool. Awesome. Fun. Great.

So you just mount the .img and get your files right?

Uhhh. No.

Damn Ubuntu won't mount the .img without a bunch of fancy commands. So I figure out the commands, and mount the directory. Great. Works. But the files are the same as the fubar drive. No more access to anything than before…

Simple, you have to fsck the disk right? As in, run some disk utility to fix the broken links and such. No luck there. Ubuntu won't fsck the .img cause it's a OSX Mac HFS+ disk. Bummer. Geez. Has a bunch of stupid errors. Boo.

So give up?

No. Just connect the usb drive to the OSX Mac machine and fix it there, right? But the OSX machine won't read the Ubuntu created NDIF .img file. Can't open it.

Give up.

No.

Ahhhhh, the secret sauce: drag the file to Disk Utility, and select mount. Doesn't work. Fails.

But then it occurs to me that the directory is fubar. So I update my DiskWarrior application to the latest 4.2 version, and try to run DiskWarrior on the .img. And it works… And it sees the files. Wow. Whoopppiiieeee! It makes a preview and then allows me to copy the files to my computer.

Wow.

The lesson: backup your damn projects. Don't be foolish and think that your data will survive your own stupidity.