mr.sumo.snr. wrote:
> "etaka" <etaka@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:1118741805.238523.14470@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> >
> > Any Mac people out there who would know how to recover a crashed disk
> > without resorting to professional help? I've got Norton Utilities, but
> > I've never had to recover more than a single deleted file. At least I
> > have two complete backup drives.

Correction: worst I've ever had to do was recover a deleted folder and
unformat the internal hard disk just a couple of weeks ago. Norton
Utilities is great.

> Do you believe the device to be physically malfunctioning or have you just
> screwed up the partition table? If the latter then I'm sure recovery of most
> of the data is possible - when the damn things stop spinning then you're
> basically fucked, unless you're willing to pay through the nose for a
> professional data recovery outfit to open up the drive, relocate the
> platters to another box and attempt to rescan.

This was just a hypothetical question just in case, but now that you
mention it, I do have a real situation. My first Macintosh, a 1990
Powerbook 170 with 40Mb hard drive has refused to start for nearly nine
years. I keep it and my accessories in the closet just in case it can
work again. There are some files in there - a journal, some working
notes for comic books I was going to draw, college homework, shareware,
Microsoft Office 4.0, and the Talking Moose (though I preferred to use
the penguin), which I have nowhere else. Even the cases of floppies I
had for backup and all my original installation disks for software like
the Pagemaker 4.2 I'm still using became unreadable years ago. Guess
I'll wait to see the only authorized Mac technician in my hometown, a
woman who used to be an Apple dealer employee who went freelance and
while I've been away has established her own business.

> I thought I'd actually try this out for fun on two identical 2 Gb (and
> therefore redundant) disks I had lying around (pRon server was down that
> week).  I had all the necessary tools - so I thought, but it soon become
> obvious why a professional outfit can charge $50 per gigabyte recovered.

That rate sounds reasonable. I think this technician charged $60 per
hour.

In 1993.