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How To Perform Data Recovery On A Failing G5 HDD?

I want to recover data from a ‘dead’ or failed HDD from my old iMac G5 PowerPC. I currently have it in a Vantec NexStar toaster dock. The old G5 has a new OWC 250GB SSD and I freshly installed OS X 10.5 Leopard. After a few failed attempts to plug the HDD into the G5 via the toaster dock, by some miraculous occurrence the thing sprung to life and I tried to copy/transfer files, but the drive suddenly shuddered and stopped, started up again but I got the error about unplugging before ejecting the disk. Anyway, it somehow started up again and I started Migration Assistant instead to see if I couldn’t just copy everything over to the SSD and go from there. Again, it shuddered and started, but got an error. And then M.A. said it was successful, but nothing was listed when I clicked on it.

Best Answered by

iBoysoft author Vain Rowe

Vain Rowe

Answered on Tuesday, August 27, 2024

By reading your descriptions and attempts, I highly recommend you contact a professional data recovery service like Drive Savers or Ontrack, as both vendors provide free estimates and both are recommended by Apple.

No normal data recovery software like iBoysoft Data Recovery Software is capable of recovering data from a failing hard drive as badly as yours since apps and even Apple support cannot handle the physical hard drive error.

Another chance you can take a risk is to clone the hard drive to a functional one and then retrieve data from it instead, yet this way only gives you the original data stored on the problematic G5 HDD. In other words, the data will be as broken as the ones in the failing drive. There is no way to repair them. I sincerely hope you are lucky enough to get all the data successfully.

Finally, even though I have stressed the importance of backup to so many people, I have to mention here again, please do BACK UP your computer and any external hard drive since hard failure or data loss accidents always happen without a sign!

 

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