Chaudywogbaaga

I woke up two weeks ago in the morning during a storm. My computer was shut down when I came down stairs. We had lost power during the night so I didn’t think too much of it. My iMac had survived numerous power outages. Not this time.

I tried turning it on. I heard the hard drive spin up and then a sickly click. I know that sound and it’s not a good one. It did it again and again. Then it showed an icon of a folder with an x on it. Meaning no file system found. I was unhappy.

I immediately started looking into web pages on rescuing a dead hard drive. Here are the bad points.
1. The hard drive will have to be replaced
2. Retrieving the information for sure (ok mostly for sure) is expensive.
3. Retrieving the information cheaply is not a sure thing.

Here are the good points
1. You might be able to save the information on the drive cheaply but you’ll only get one or two shots at it.
2. If it’s vital information and/or you have the money, it’s very likely that you can pay someone to get the information off it.

Seeing as I have very little money, I opted for the cheap method. This is how I went about replacing my iMac hard drive and attempted to retrieve data from my failed hard drive.

My method after the jump.

Follow up:

I have a laptop that I could use to download the information on the drive to but that would require one of two things. Ether a firewire cord to connect my iMac to the laptop and put the iMac in target disk mode or a SATA to USB converter.

There are a lot of things you can do to bring back a hard drive if it is a software failure. It’s even possible to replace the control board on the hard drive. I’ve fixed plenty of drives that have a software failure. I haven’t swapped control boards but it doesn’t look to hard.

Unfortunately my hard drive had a mechanical failure. There were only two suggested solutions for this that didn’t involve paying $600-$2000. There was one clear winner for how to temporarily resurrect the hard drive. It involves putting the hard drive in the freezer over night. Many people had posted that they were able to get the drive to work long enough to pull vital data off it by freezing. The only other option was to crack the drive case and free up the stuck parts enough to let it run long enough to get something off it. Both of these options only give a hope of minutes of run time.

I decided to freeze the drive and then if that didn’t work, crack the case. That would mean I’d have to remove the hard drive from my iMac. iMacs are not take apart friendly but I learned everything I needed from this video. There are some unclear points but it was enough to get me through.

I was still in the planning phase at this point. I decided to head over to Best Buy to look for a SATA to USB converter, otherwise known as an external hard drive case (this is a kit that you supply your own hard drive). I almost picked up one for $50 but I was looking around and saw all the hard drives were between $80-$150. Then I noticed that the external hard drives (these came with a hard drive in them) were between $80-$250, but most were $110 for a 1 TB drive. I got to thinking that I would eventually need another drive for the iMac so I did some quick math. At best it would cost me $130 to buy the converter and the drive and I would only be getting a 350 GB drive out of the deal.

The only problems were that I didn’t really have enough money and the external drives aren’t meant to be taken apart. I looked at a My Book by Western Digital (1 T. And then I noticed an Iomega Prestige that was 1 TB that was ten dollars cheaper but the box did not say that the drive in it was a 3.5 inch SATA. Fortunately Best Buy has computers connected to the internet and I was able to find out that I did not want the My Book because they made it hard to take apart and that the Iomega Prestige is indeed a 3.5 inch SATA drive and usually are good quality drives.

So now the plan was to take the drive out of the Iomega and put it in the iMac, reload the OS and then try and rescue the data off the drive.

Heres how it went.

The iMac, the external drive, a t8 torx driver and a nail clipper.

Lay the iMac down to remove screws. It’s actually easier to lay it on it’s screen to remove the screws. There were 4 t8 torx screws and two philips head on the ram panel.

For this I also needed a philips head screwdriver so I grabbed my Leatherman and a utility knife (which I’ll explain later).

With the top case removed. The clips on top are a little tricky. I bent them a little trying to take the case off. Try and be careful while lifting off the case so as not to do that. Taking the screen off is a matter of carefully peeling away heavy duty aluminum tape from all around the screen (see the video). Then four t8 torx head screws, one in each corner of the screen.

There were five cables that connected the screen to the rest of the computer. Four were on the left and just pull out. The fifth is a ribbon cable that has two buttons on the sides that need to be pressed in to detach the cable.

Detaching the hard drive is not hard. There are two screws on the left they are slighly longer than the case screws so set them away from those.

Once those are removed the drive lifts out but be careful there is a temperature sensor, a power cable and a data cable that are very short.

The temp sensor unplugs from it’s cable but it’s glued to the hard drive. That’s where the utility knife comes in.

The hole in the iMac.

One blog suggested putting the hard drive in a Ziploc bag to prevent condensation so that’s what I did.

Now for the Iomega. This was a real treat. After struggling with the iMac, this thing was a breeze. There are two phillips head screws to remove on the back. Take those out.

This is what it looks like.

Now the front panel slides out. Its that easy! No glue, no tabs! I’m sure Iomega doesn’t want me doing this but thank you for making it a simple task!

This is what is inside the heavy duty aluminum case of the Iomega Prestige.

And here is the 1TB drive installed in my iMac. I used silicone caulk to glue the temp sensor onto the drive. Everyone else used rubber cement. I didn’t have any.

And the drive goes in the freezer.

I had a really hard time putting the torx screws that go around the screen back in they are non-magnetic and would fall off the bit so I wrapped them in scotch tape while on the driver and then screwed them in. It was not an ideal solution because the tape stayed with the screw. It’s not a big deal but it slightly bugged me. It won’t hurt anything.

I had some trouble installing OS X on the drive but I did eventually get through it. I really should have formatted the drive off my laptop before hand but if you don’t have another computer this is how I got OS X on the drive.

First you need your reinstall disk or an OS X disk. Put it in the slot. The iMac will try the hard drive first and not find anything and then boot from the DVD. I think holding down c will have it boot off the DVD immediately.

Choose your language and the install process will start. It will start by asking you where you want the OS installed. At this point you can go up to the menus up top and look for Disk Utility under the Utilities menu. Select the disk, go to partition. You are probably going to want only one partition but you could go for more if you want. It will give you format options. You will want Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Then you will want to click on the option button and select GUID Partition Table. It won’t work if you don’t do that.

After that process is done you can install the OS.

Saving the old drive’s data
The next day I took the drive out of the freezer. I plugged it into the Iomega chassis ,hooked it up to my iMac and powered it on. I got about five seconds of the drive spinning up without clicking. After it started clicking, I couldn’t get it to mount.

I tried opening the case. There is a hidden screw under the label sticker. After taking it apart, I was able to get it to spin up without clicking! The main thing was loosening that hidden screw. Unfortunately while the drive would show up it wouldn’t properly mount. I tried and tried but couldn’t get it to mount.