Comments on: Recovering Disk Images with DiskWarrior

By: Dead iMac Hard Drive Recovery « Austin’s Weblog

Dead iMac Hard Drive Recovery « Austin’s Weblog — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:03:36 +0000

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By: bbum

bbum — Sat, 10 May 2008 07:02:23 +0000

I don’t think Terminal is going to help you much. You might have some more luck w/one of the disk recovery utilities, but I don’t know if they support TM volumes properly yet or not (I think they do).

By: nevrozel

nevrozel — Sat, 10 May 2008 06:13:42 +0000

I I’m having the same problem with a Time Machine corrupt HDD. Every time I connect it to the Mac, I instantly get kernel panics. I tried to enter the terminal command before attaching the drive but I get an error: “hdiutil: mount failed – No such file or directory”. When I connect the drive, it mounts and I get the kernel panic.

Can somebody tell me how exactly should I use the terminal in order to be able to attach the Time Machine drive without mounting it?

Thank you very much.

By: bowmasters

bowmasters — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:29:28 +0000

So, what can one do if an image is so corrupt that the “hdiutil mount -nomount -readwrite” command doesn’t even allow the image to mount?

By: DV for Teachers » Blog Archive » Recovering Disk Images with DiskWarrior

Wed, 01 Mar 2006 14:59:15 +0000

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By: In-side » Blog Archive » links for 2006-02-22

In-side » Blog Archive » links for 2006-02-22 — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 21:03:24 +0000

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By: DHerren

DHerren — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 20:06:09 +0000

I’ve been very happily using ProSoft Engineering’s Data Backup. It does everything you would typically want in a backup solution, doesn’t require a dot mac account, and best of all for me, can be configured to automatically backup whenever the backup volume mounts. I have an external firewire drive I back up to, and all I have to do is plug it in in the morning, grab a cup of coffee, and by the time I’m back, I can eject the drive and unplug it with no additional intervention. It does run a daemon to watch for the mount, and launch the command line backup. There is a decent gui for configuration, and if you really need that “one click” you can run the gui.

By: Keith

Keith — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 18:49:48 +0000

I agree DiskWarrior can be a great tool. However, when DiskWarrior fails, and you don't have a good backup, then Data Rescue X is a life saver. I keep my Users data on a seperate internal harddisk. After I upgraded to 10.4, I made the mistake of running Tech Tool Pro. At taht time that version of Tech Tool Pro had issues with a Mac OS X 10.4 system, and ended up corrupting my Users disk. DiskWarrior, Disk Utility, and AppleJack (fsck) were not able to repair the drive. After a couple of days trying in vain to repair my drive I finally found Data Rescue X and was able to at least recover most of my data to a networked drive and reformat the disk. Unfortunately, I've now don't use Tech Tool Pro anymore. I also abbonned Norton many moons ago. I've been burned to many times. The only repari tool I use anymore is AppleJack. Thankfully, I don't even have to use it too often. Can anybody recommend a safe and reliable harddisk (and system) repair tool? I now use a homegrown backup system built around rsync to keep all my critical files backed up on a network drive. I too would like an incremental back up system, but have not found a good system yet. With the kernel sending out notifications of every filesystem change (for spotlight) seems like an excellent way to create an incremental back system. Check out FSLogger if you want to see every file system modification on a 10.4 system.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 16:53:30 +0000

I can definitely see the added safety you get from incremental backups. I’ve very rarely experienced that kind of data loss personally. The other thing you could do is keep an external disk of backup images that you rotate through. It will happily back up to a disk image and that leaves you with a bit more wiggle room in case of the problem you mentioned. I imagine the best solution is some kind of combination of the two techniques though. A full clone to make restoring a working system easy with incremental backups for your really important working data that isn’t already in something like Subversion.

By: bbum

bbum — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 16:24:25 +0000

Neat product. From the company that did netTunes — I used that all the time when it first came out.

Restoring from backup always sucks because, invariably, you have lost some number of hours of data. And if it is your home account you are restoring, then there is always the need to verify that system configuration is restored correctly, something that super-duper avoids.

With a cost, though. It appears to always make an image of the drive? I have found that I occasionally end up with “data eating bit rot” type filesystem corruption. The kind I might not notice for a few days or weeks that is gradually causing data loss. I really need incremental backups so I can go back in time and find the good copy of something.

Now — one might be asking why I am experiencing such catastrophes on a seemingly rock solid system. It is because I’m regularly poking around in things on the other side of the user/kernel wall and/or I have something far far from production quality installed. I.e. I’m doing this to myself as a part of my day job.