I received a call from a client that needed a MacBook Pro spinning wheel recovery. Their MacBook Pro would get stuck on the spinning wheel at startup and would not boot fully. They had taken the computer to a computer repair shop hoping they would be able to get the machine to boot again, but the repair shop told them the issue was with the hard drive. This meant the client could get the hard drive replaced in the laptop and have a working machine again, but any of the data that was on the old laptop drive could not be transferred over to the new laptop drive.
MacBook Pro Data Recovery
This client had both work documents and family photos on their computer before it failed, so they needed data recovery services to get that important data back as safely as possible. The repair shop recommended us to help complete the spinning wheel recovery project and the client brought their drive in for recovery.
Diagnosing the Seagate drive
Some people are surprised to learn that the drives inside the older MacBook Pro are actually Seagate drives most of the time. In this case, the physical parts of the Seagate drive looked good. Heads looked good, platters looked good, no issues with the PCB that I could see. So I hooked the drive up to my PC-3000 and started the diagnosis process.
Imaging process
I was able to get access to the data on the platters right away. A quick heads test showed that the heads were indeed functioning, so I continued on with my standard settings for imaging the drive. I always turn off most of the features the drive has when it runs into bad sectors. Basically, a lot of drives will recognize when they run into bad sectors and try to note where the bad sector is so it is not used in the future. This and other firmware-related features are best to have off during the imaging process.
Once the drive was configured for imaging, I started the imaging process with a quick pass to get the bulk of the sectors back and see if there were any issues with the drive other than bad sectors. The first pass got over 95% of the sectors back, so I continued with more and more intense imaging passes until I had gotten back all the data possible from the drive.
Successful spinning wheel recovery
The final spinning wheel recovery amount was 99.999% of the sectors on the drive, which is an excellent recovery scenario. Now that I had the sectors back, I continued with the software data recovery stage to retrieve all the file names and folder structure for the data and moved everything over to the new drive. The data was protected with FileVault encryption, so I did have to get the password from the customer in order to complete the data recovery.
Recovery turnaround time
The entire recovery process on this drive took 3 days. Because the drive was encrypted it fell under our Standard+ affordable recovery tier. The client was very pleased to have all their important data back, safe and sound.
Start the recovery process
If you need to get important data off a Mac that has stopped working, I can help! I spent a few years working in a Mac shop back in the day, so I am very familiar with data recovery with Mac computers. Just give me a call at (620) 615-6836 to discuss your project or request a data recovery cost quote by filling out my quote form. I look forward to working with you!
Drive Info: 500GB Seagate ST9500325ASG FW: 0009APM1 PN: 9KAG34-043 655-1477 DATE: 12123 SITE: WU
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