Hi every, this is probably the first time I post question here. I will try my best to put up as much detail as I can here. Thank you for your patient.
My hard drive failed a few days ago. The 2014 iMac could not start. I saw prohibitory sign. It is a 21.5" 2014 iMac with i5 core and 500GB hard drive. I took it to Apple store to run a test. The guy told me that hard drive is failing. There may be a way to use a thunder bolt to connect it to another good working Mac and the good one may detect it as an external hard drive and I maybe able to get the old files that way. I don’t have another Mac. I got an external hard drive so I just went into the recovery mode and put the OS operating system into the external hard drive and boot it from there. It actually worked. I can get in now through the external hard drive with the newly installed OS X in it.
So I tried to get the old data from the old hard drive. From Disk Utility, I was able to see the Apple HDD but it says it has a hardware problem and can’t be repaired. Try to back up as much data as possible and replace the disk.
Opening up the iMac and replace it with a new hard drive will cost too much money. Is there any software that can extract data / data recovery software that would work? All I got in the old hard drive were some photos and some important documents. I don’t have many important projects and apps in there. As long as I can get all the photos and documents out, I will be very happy. And it looks like the thunderbolt method may not work either. Or the thunderbolt method is another pathway so it may still work??? I’m already in a working OS system now but still couldn’t find the old files. Do you guys know of any other ways to get the data from that old hard drive?
My external hard drive is the 2TB Seagate SSD but now it looks like I can even install the OS in a USB flash drive with 200GB good enough. I have used this iMac for 5 years and I only used 120GB out of the 500GB. 200GB flash drive cost about $18 to $24. If I can recover those old pix and old docs, I will be so happy!! I hope you guys could enlighten me a lil bit so I can get this fixed. Thank you so much!!
Hi, since you mentioned that an external hard drive with a macOS installed can boot up the iMac successfully, you can recover old files from the computer that way. Just download and install a suitable macOS on the external hard drive > then boot your device up > install a professional data recovery utility with placing it on the external hard drive after starting the computer > begin the old file retrieval with data recovery software > then you’re all done!
iBoysoft Data Recovery Software is able to scan for any files from the hard drive can show you the scanned results, when you ensure the files you want are scanned by this software, you can then purchase for a license to get all your old pics and documents out!
Here is how to recover files using iBoysoft Data Recovery Software:
Download and install iBoysoft Data Recovery to the external hard drive. Do not place this software to the Mac hard drive or it might overwrite the files you need.
Open this software and select the Mac hard drive in the device list.
Click Search for Lost Data to begin the file scanning through the whole hard drive.
Select the scanned file and right-click it to select Preview to have a pre-check before data recovery.
Select the files you want and click Recover to bring them back. Choose the external hard drive as the file destination but not the Mac hard drive, for which might cause data loss one more time!
Not that you have no working Mac at hand, why not take your iMac to professional data recovery service like Drive Savers or Ontrack? Both vendors provide free estimates and both vendors are recommended by Apple and other OEMs. Just power off the iMac immediately and don’t power on the drive again so you don’t make the failure any worse.
You should always have frequent and regular backups of your computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data.