hard Drive fail?

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hopefulhype

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Nov 15, 2011
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My harddrive on my macbook pro seems to have stopped working. It froze up when i was using the laptop then when i rebooted i got the flashing folder.

I tried using the disk utility but i do not see the hard drive in the disk utility

I took the drive out and plugged it into my pc via sata cable

the computer can see the drive but it does not get a drive letter. In addition, I went into seatools and i can perform some tests on the drive.

How can i get access to the drive so that I can get my data?
 
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Windows can't read the filesystem used by OS X. You should not get a drive letter when plugging it into Windows. Things like CDs and flash drives work because they use different filesystems (at least I think OS X plays nice and uses a more widely use filesystem for flash drives).

There are, however, some programs out there that can make this work in a roundabout way, allowing you to "mount" the drive in Windows using the program as the middle man. You could use one of these to determine if the drive is working, using the Windows computer. Unfortunately, I don't know the name of any such programs off the top of my head. You can probably find one in 30 seconds of Googling.

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nao1120

nao1120

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Mar 27, 2009
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You need to use another MAC that can read the drive HFS file system.. This is a long shot here in this post also:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1368010

It may read it after that driver install perhaps.. But i will agree the data may likely be lost. You shouldn't need to assign it any drive letters, it should just read automatically if the hard drive is "readable".

I don't really get why drives brick like that, You would think they would just be terribly loud, and thus allow you to notice this/back up etc.
 
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willard

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Nov 12, 2010
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Windows can't read the filesystem used by OS X. You should not get a drive letter when plugging it into Windows. Things like CDs and flash drives work because they use different filesystems (at least I think OS X plays nice and uses a more widely use filesystem for flash drives).

There are, however, some programs out there that can make this work in a roundabout way, allowing you to "mount" the drive in Windows using the program as the middle man. You could use one of these to determine if the drive is working, using the Windows computer. Unfortunately, I don't know the name of any such programs off the top of my head. You can probably find one in 30 seconds of Googling.


It's actually HFS+. Could be an important distinction when looking at freeware to mount the drive (freeware often has crap compatibility, wouldn't be surprised to see one that supports HFS but not HFS+).

I don't really get why drives brick like that, You would think they would just be terribly loud, and thus allow you to notice this/back up etc.
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That might happen if the bearing went out, but this pretty much never happens. Hard drives can fail in many interesting ways, and pretty much all of them are silent and have no warning. One of the most common, and most insidious, is the "head crash." This occurs when the drive head (the bit that reads/writes data from the drive) comes into contact with the platter. Since the platters move at incredibly high speed, this causes the head to literally gouge out a track on the platter, destroying the drive forever. This is why you're not supposed to move computers while they're on, by the way. Laptops drives are likely designed to tolerate more movement (I've never actually looked into it).
 
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