On 2014-09-05 Dan Martin wrote:
I ran out of hard drive space on my MacBook Air, so I spent the last few days transferring everything to an external drive, the same one
If you haven't done much besides formatting/partitioning the original Air drive, that is probably the best bet for recovery of important files. Don't write anything more to it until you image it or decide for sure what you want to do.
put on it, like John says, was too depressing and it just couldn't take it. I am unable to revive it, and I fear my data is lost just before I could back it up.
What kind of symptom/noise is the drive making? How far do you get with it? BIOS recognition? OS recognition? See the partn table? Even with a head crash you should be able to get data off the rest of the drive. There are tricks...
If anyone knows of a fairly cheap place that might be able to recover some data on post mortem, I would appreciate it.
I've done it myself enough times, and written my own perl tools to help (like 15 years ago), but now there are a few good Linux similar tools like photorec and ddrescue, and one other that escapes me at the mo.
I think the trick for you is seeing how you can "cheat" by figuring out how far you can get with the two drives. There are tricks... you might get lucky.
I can provide help for a pre-arranged fee through my business if you have nowhere else to go. Certainly cheaper than mail-away recovery places.
If you want to proceed yourself, the FIRST line of business is dd (or ddrescue) what you can to spare drives, then work off the spares.
Good luck!