This is not necessarily, entirely a Mac question, it's a hardware question, but I'll go through the whole story, or you can scroll to the end to get to my question.
I know some of you guys use Macs with FreeBSD so I thought I'd take a stab in the dark that someone here has come across this problem and fixed it.
My son has an iMac from around 2009, or maybe 2011. The one with a 27-inch screen. He went out of town for a few days leaving his computer on. When he came back and tried to bring his screen up, it showed a progress bar, as if it was updating something, stuck at 50%. Rebooting the computer didn't change that.
I don't know much of anything about iMacs so I Google'd around and found how to access the disk utility with Cmd+R and tried to do a verify on the HD drive and another one which I forgot the name of. The utility said the HD drive wasn't formatted properly, I think. The other drive just said it was locked and couldn't be tested.
Then we tried the main drive which came back quickly saying the volume was OK. So he rebooted and, this time, only get the folder with the question mark which I've come to learn means it can't find the operating system.
So then we reset the PRAM but that solved nothing and, now, we hear the disk drive clicking every so often and that's never good.
He took it to the Apple store tonight where they ran diagnostics but that only showed the computer could not find any hard drive. They're leaving it for tomorrow to do more testing to see if the hard drive is bad, a cable, or something else.
So the usual stupid part of this is that he didn't back up everything he should back up despite my years of persistent warnings that days like today will eventually happen. I've read some places that people have brought drives back to life by booting from the original boot disk and unplugging the drive or checking to make sure the main drive is still selected as the boot drive but I would think the Apple folk would know to try these things.
If someone has any experience or knowledge of what to try to revive or retrieve data off this disk, I'd appreciate knowing what to try.
My real question, however, is this: should he come home from the Apple store with a new drive in his system and the old drive in his hand, does anyone know the best way to try and retrieve data off that disk? I'm hoping I can plug it into one of my boxes here at home but, more importantly, I have to hope I can get it to spin up at all.
I know some of you guys use Macs with FreeBSD so I thought I'd take a stab in the dark that someone here has come across this problem and fixed it.
My son has an iMac from around 2009, or maybe 2011. The one with a 27-inch screen. He went out of town for a few days leaving his computer on. When he came back and tried to bring his screen up, it showed a progress bar, as if it was updating something, stuck at 50%. Rebooting the computer didn't change that.
I don't know much of anything about iMacs so I Google'd around and found how to access the disk utility with Cmd+R and tried to do a verify on the HD drive and another one which I forgot the name of. The utility said the HD drive wasn't formatted properly, I think. The other drive just said it was locked and couldn't be tested.
Then we tried the main drive which came back quickly saying the volume was OK. So he rebooted and, this time, only get the folder with the question mark which I've come to learn means it can't find the operating system.
So then we reset the PRAM but that solved nothing and, now, we hear the disk drive clicking every so often and that's never good.
He took it to the Apple store tonight where they ran diagnostics but that only showed the computer could not find any hard drive. They're leaving it for tomorrow to do more testing to see if the hard drive is bad, a cable, or something else.
So the usual stupid part of this is that he didn't back up everything he should back up despite my years of persistent warnings that days like today will eventually happen. I've read some places that people have brought drives back to life by booting from the original boot disk and unplugging the drive or checking to make sure the main drive is still selected as the boot drive but I would think the Apple folk would know to try these things.
If someone has any experience or knowledge of what to try to revive or retrieve data off this disk, I'd appreciate knowing what to try.
My real question, however, is this: should he come home from the Apple store with a new drive in his system and the old drive in his hand, does anyone know the best way to try and retrieve data off that disk? I'm hoping I can plug it into one of my boxes here at home but, more importantly, I have to hope I can get it to spin up at all.
