How Data Rescue Saved My Life (sort of) Pt. II

We’ve left off in part one, where the internal hard drive in my MacBook Pro became non-mountable, Apple replaced the hard drive, I was able to diagnose the bad hard-drive, and pinpoint the problem to a BAD SUPER BLOCK.

So I needed some kind of  software that could access a non-mounted hard drive and read data off of it to retrieve the two months worth of files. The two months I’ve slacked off from connecting an external USB drive for a TimeMachine backup. I scoured the web for some answers and got myself to the website for Prosoft’s DataRescue 3 (actually, the version number was 3.2).

After reading some mixed reviews on online discussion forums, and my past experiences with software data recovery, I wasn’t sure if DataRescue  would work, but heck, there was a free trial version – which I went ahead and downloaded. The trial version would display a list of all the recoverable files but had a limit of recovering 1 file up to 10 MB. If this went well, I would go ahead and register online for a serial number to unlock the full version.

After downloading the demo, I installed it on the new internal drive and opened the app. DataRescue 3 had a somewhat dumbed down graphical interface, but this was good. People who just lost access to the hard drive are in a panic, and they don’t need complicated instructions on how to try to recover their data. Simple gigantic icons worked well.

My choices for scanning the drive was “Quick Scan” and “Deep Scan”. I would try out the Quick Scan first.

Unfortunately, Quick Scan failed, giving me an error… okay, I’ll try the DeepScan.