Mac drives · file closed · HUL-2025-0621
Ten Minutes of Nothing, So Out Came the Lead.
The Backup Plus gave her ten solid minutes of that coloured wheel
one morning, so she took the lead out, because I was sure the Mac had frozen
. Two goes later it would not appear on anything at all
. She teaches piano in Skegness, and the drive went to lessons and back again in the car boot. Eleven years of recordings were held on it, the copies her pupils go home with. No second set existed anywhere.
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What causes it.
A Mac will not put a volume on screen until it has read the catalogue through, and hers sat directly on top of a stretch of surface that was going. So the ten minutes belonged to the disk, not the machine: the same sectors requested, refused, requested again, with the Finder waiting at the end of that line. Then the obvious thing happens. Out with the lead, back in, one more try — and every one of those tries drags the heads back over the thinnest ground on the platter. What is slow to read in March can be unreadable by April.
The tools this one needed.
The steps we follow →| The gear | What this one did | Why we have it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Imaged with a light touch, and no operating system was let near the volume | Grades each head first, reads one surface at a time, and keeps resets, timeouts and power under control |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Reassembled the HFS+ volume from the image with its catalogue whole | Opens the volume formats most tools cannot: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS, Btrfs |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Went in at service level and charted the failing band underneath | Reaches the vendor service commands an ordinary ATA connection cannot |
The stages.
Booked in, and kept off every computer
The Seagate went onto bench hardware on arrival and stayed on it; nothing running an operating system touched the drive again. Service-level access named the fault straight away — a widening band of dead sectors sat exactly where HFS+ stores its catalogue. That explains the ten-minute wait, and the morning it stopped answering as well.
Metadata copied ahead of the audio, slowly
Sequence mattered more than pace here. Catalogue and metadata were taken before anything else, at low speed, with retries held short, because those few small regions are what return a name and a lesson date to each recording. The audio itself followed. And one point worth making plainly: pulling the lead out had damaged nothing.
Repairs ran on the copy, never the drive
No repair work went near the Seagate; all of it ran on the finished image. Do it the other way round and eleven years arrive as a heap of unnamed files instead of folders carrying a name and a year. Every name, every date and the structure they sat in came back with the audio.
How it finished.
She had her own folder tree back, and would not sign anything off until she had played lessons from three years on either side. Nine recordings came back cut short, every one of them out of the worst part of that band. The report names all nine.
What people read after this.
Other cases on Apple machines.
Is yours doing the same?
Turn it off. Send it to us. The diagnosis comes first. It says which files are still readable and which are not.