This iMac hard drive not showing up was a Hitachi drive from a client who said the issue came up out of the blue. The client brought the computer to a computer repair shop when it started acting up and the shop found the issue with the computer was the HDS722020ALA330 hard drive itself. They pulled the hard drive from the Mac and tested it with another computer, but the drive would not mount or be recognized when plugged into a computer.
2011 iMac Drive Recovery
There were photos and work documents on this drive that were important to the client, so the computer repair shop in Wichita, Kansas recommended their client bring the drive to us for an affordable clean room data recovery. Spoiler alert, this drive did not require a cleanroom recovery. A lot of shops think if they can’t get the data from the drive it must need to be opened up, but that is actually pretty rare unless the drive was dropped. We get a lot of drives sent to us from computer repair shops, and we do have a referral program available if you are interested in working with us!
Diagnosing hard drive not showing up issue
When I received the drive I connected it to the PC-3000 for diagnostics and found that while it was responding and I was able to read data from the platters, it was running very very slowly. So slowly that it would take a very long time to mount on a computer running a standard operating system (if it had mounted at all); then, if it had fully mounted, it would have taken several months at least to image the drive fully. Letting a drive run for months on end is not recommended, by the way.
In this case, the slowness was caused by a firmware issue. Basically, there is a portion of the hard drive’s firmware that watches for sectors that are failing on the drive. When the hard drive recognizes a bad sector, it marks the sector as bad and moves any data that is in or near these bad sectors to parts of the drive that are good. This auto-relocation portion of the firmware was corrupt and the cause of the issue, so by turning it off I was able to get access to the data on the drive.
Imaging the HDS722020ALA330 hard drive
Once I had access to the data on the platters, 100% of the sectors on the drive were imaged over quickly. The entire recovery process on this drive was completed within 3 days of drop-off. With the knowledge, expertise, and tools necessary to recover this drive, I was able to recover it for our affordable Standard rate. No cleanroom recovery was necessary!
This drive was from inside an iMac that was about 10 years old. I recommend always having a backup of all important data, but it becomes even more important as the drive gets older. As a drive ages, the chance of it having a failure goes up substantially.
Affordable Hitachi data recovery service
Do you have a Mac drive that needs recovery? I offer hard drive recovery for all types of computers including Macs and Windows Machines. Please give me a call or fill out my free quote form to get the process started. I look forward to helping you recover your important data.
Drive info: 2TB Hitachi HDS722020ALA330, Apple Firmware 2010, MLC: JPK35E, 655-1563F, OCT-2011, P/N: 0F12944
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