...more recent posts
If everything were this easy...
My friends second generation iMac had a severe crash that rendered the machine unbootable. They took it to Tek Serve where they were told the problem was a hard disk hardware failure, with no chance of recovery. One night, in a (most likely) drunken state I was boasting that they should let me take a crack at it. Although I do know a lot about Macs, I also know that Tek Serve is very good. So if they couldn't rescue it, I probably couldn't either.
But, I figured it would at least give me a chance to try the Mr. Barrett hard drive in the freezer trick. I've been dying to wow someone with that. Of course I'd only try it if all other avenues had been exhausted.
So first I put the drive into a blue & white g3 tower and tried to boot it. No luck, and worse, the drive was making some scary sounds as it spun up. So I popped Disk Warrior into the CD tray and rebooted from that. It couldn't mount the drive, but it was seeing it. So I let DW repair the directory structure. 10 seconds later the drive mounts on the desktop. I copied all the data onto my other drive without incident (although I don't know how much data was originally on the drive, so possibly some things were still lost - although it really doesn't look that way.)
So the obvious question is: why doesn't Tek Serve run Disk Warrior in every case like this? I really can't believe they don't. Maybe the drive "fixed itself" slightly by just sitting for a few days? Seems unlikely too. I wonder what the real story is.