Hard Disk Recovery
I recently had to help a friend of mine rescue a couple of external hard drives that that contained a lot of important files that got corrupted and would not mount properly on his mac.
After a little help from #Claude I got a process that was unbelievably successful.
Step 1 - Clone HDD
I cloned the disk to make an image so that I had a backup of the corrupted data.
First I had to get the actual dive that I wanted to clone
diskutil list
From the output I could see that the mac could attach the disk, as it was listed but could not mount it.
sudo dd if=/dev/disk5 of=/Volumes/backup/disk_image.dmg bs=1m status=progress
Step 2 - Data Recovery
I was then able to use the incredible program https://dmde.com/ to access the disk image. After a full scan it was able to retrieve all the files for me. Its an unbelievable tool that is great value.
I have alway hesitated before this paid for tools as I am always worried are they going to be scam tools. But this tool was fantastic.
I then repeated the process with some older disks that I had that had failed, but never threw away as was worried that had some missing picture on them.
I tried the open source tools TestDisk which comes with PhotoRec which was able to recover the files, but it lost the folder structure and file names, which for 2TB of data was going to be a nightmare to rebuild. So the small feed for https://dmde.com/ was well work it.
This is something that I have tried to do a number of times in the past but always given up. Whilst Claude did not give me the perfect solution, it gave me enough of a direction, that with my own searches I was able to find the right advice in reddit, and then to zero down on a product that was legit.
Some other valid tools and research areas for when this happens again!!!