I spent the day on the phone with Apple only to be told that it looked like everything was lost.
Monday the 19th at 9am. I bring the computer into Apple to be told they can't do anything and I should bring it to an authorized Apple technician.
Monday the 19th at 930am. I leave my computer at an authorized Apple technician in Saco in hopes that they can get in contact with my hard drive. 4pm - no luck. My hard drive is unrecognizable / undetectable. I am hold I can send my computer to California for data retrieval but that can be very expensive.
I find this unacceptable.
I do some research and find a small company (TechBento) in Portland that does data retrieval. Once we get the data off my computer I can bring it to Apple and they will fix it for free - they just don't do data retrieval. Their idea of fixing things is wiping it all clean and replacing. Monday afternoon I have a great conversation Carl from TechBento.
Tuesday the 20th at 9am. I drop my computer off at TechBento and wait patiently.
Wednesday the 21st. I get this report:
We got some mixed results so far. First, we can't actually confirm the head assembly is not moving to all areas of the disk but we can say only about 32GB are accessible. We will make several more attempts to see if we can identify the issue. It is beginning to look like a mis-aligned head assembly, but we have a few tools left to try to deal with that before escalating it.
I'm not sure what they means but I'm thankful they're working on it. I ask a few more detailed questions.
Friday the 23rd. I get this report:
We'll update you once we have some results to report back. This is not a simple case, therefore we have to setup the best procedure for an extraction attempt.
Great. Not. A. Simple. Case.
Friday the 23rd in the afternoon I get this report:
We got all of the data off but it's not in a shape we like to deliver; there is about 34Gb recovered. Basically, at this stage, if we were to leave it as is, you are looking at having many of your files listed in unnamed, unorganized folders. The files themselves ave correct names, but they don't have a home. Searching the drive for things like "*.PDF" will reveal all the files. The reason this is this way is because the drive lost structural information. The results appear comprehensive but because we lack the file structure we can't verify that against a manifest.
If we leave it here, you have all of your data, and this is a basic T1 case. If we begin to try to rebuild it, this will move to a Tier2 and we may end up with the same exact results. The information we need to reconstruct the data set is what's not accessible to us at this point. Also, it would be great to get some important file names so we can spot check for them.
I am attaching a screen shot of what some of the files look like, and also the folder structure is visible near the bottom. Let me know if you would like us to spot check for key files, or give me a better idea of what kind of data we can search for, and we can decide whether or not stopping here is the best move.
Okay so this is progress. I guess. Instead of a neat and organized library, I have a very large pile of books - but all my books are there - I just need to organize them. Okay I think I can do that.
Later on the 23rd I give Carl a list of files for him to search for in the heap of data. I have heard nothing since then.
So the lessons learned from this: Always, always, always back up your computer. Plain and simple.
Thankfully I have a work computer (yeah, remember I went back to work - it's amazing and I love every moment!) and email on my phone so I'm able to function, but this has been horrible!
To be continued.....
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