DiskWarrior Help

[FaultyWarrior]

Not sure how many Mac users are here, so this is probably a shot in the dark.  A co-worker asked me to repair his MacBook Pro (2011, 15").  Failed (failing?) hard drive.  As typical with a lot of people, his last backup is several months old.  I said I'd see what I can salvage.  Booted his machine from a DiskWarrior 5 USB stick and let it run.  It flew through steps 1-4, and then on step 5 (locating directory data); it's been running for almost 2 days, and says, "speed reduced by disk malfunction:" and a number.  Not having used DiskWarrior in over a decade, I had to look that up...apparently the number of errors it's encountered.  Well, said number just past 1 million (as in 1 followed by six zeros - 1000000!).  I could hear the drive clunking loudly as yesterday, so I figured it was on its deathbed.   Knowing the drive is pretty much hosed, is it worth letting DW keep running, or should I just throw in the towel, drop in the new HDD, install a fresh copy of Sierra, and kindly remind the owner to backup his machine more?

 

On a side-note, prior to running DW, I did try imaging the drive with dd in Terminal (my usual data recovery tactic)...no dice.  Just kept filling my console with I/O errors, hence why I moved on to trying DiskWarrior.

[Electronics Wizardy]

I personally use ddresuce, but its about the same thing

 

It could take a week as it will slowly try to get the data.

 

If you care about the data, don't touch it, else buy a new drive.

[FaultyWarrior]

13 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

I personally use ddresuce, but its about the same thing

 

It could take a week as it will slowly try to get the data.

 

If you care about the data, don't touch it, else buy a new drive.

Yeah, he said that at-most he'll lose a few pictures; but nothing too huge.  I'll see how it does in the morning.  I can't even tell if the drive is still functional at all since I don't hear it seeking.

 

I know he sorta wants his machine back, so I'll probably can it in the morning, replace the drive, and then let a spare tower take a DD image, and then save what I can from the image, since at this point, diskutil doesn't even know what to make of the drive.

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 minutes ago, FaultyWarrior said:

Yeah, he said that at-most he'll lose a few pictures; but nothing too huge.  I'll see how it does in the morning.  I can't even tell if the drive is still functional at all since I don't hear it seeking.

 

I know he sorta wants his machine back, so I'll probably can it in the morning, replace the drive, and then let a spare tower take a DD image, and then save what I can from the image, since at this point, diskutil doesn't even know what to make of the drive.

use ddrescue, its made for this, it also shows progress.

[FaultyWarrior]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

use ddrescue, its made for this, it also shows progress.

I shall do that.  Thank you for the tip!