http://www.macintosh-data-recovery.com/

the /usr and /home directories are there, but largely unused by the upper level mac os.

SpinRite does it by not giving up trying as quickly as an OS or file system utility will.

Sometimes trying more times will get that one good enough read that lets the data be moved to a good area of the disk. SpinRite takes this to the extreme, in some situations it will try for weeks and finally succeed in making the drive readable. You then will have one last shot to get the data off and hopefully the weeks of anxiety will drive home the lessen to backup your data.

Myself and the IT guy at work have never had it take more than 4 days and it has worked in better than half of the times we have used it. We’ve never used it for our own or company data because it is easier to just restore from the backups. Our usage has always been for co-workers, family and friends home PC’s. The usual scenario is the drive crashes and it has data that is not backed up anywhere. The data isn’t worth the $500.00 to $1500.00 it costs for a clean room repair so at that point there is nothing to lose.

First, SpinRite is a last resort when you are not willing to spend hundreds of dollars on professional clean room recovery. As you noticed Greg, it writes back to the disk so under worst case scenarios it can take a drive that may have been recoverable for $1000.00 and make it unrecoverable at any price.

Second SpinRite comes with a 30-day absolute satisfaction guarantee so if you don’t like it you get a refund. http://www.grc.com/cs/licenseinfo.htm

So, if your at the point of giving up because nothing else works (e.g. ddrescue can’t read the drive), SpinRite gives you one last out before tossing it in the trash and facing lost data.

Geek Squad stuff

They don’t do HDD recovery in-store, so it wouldn’t be surprising if in-store employees couldn’t answer questions about the recovery process itself, especially since so few people ask followup questions after finding out the cost. I worked there for about a year, and I can count on one hand the number of people who didn’t (justifiably) balk at the cost.

SpinRite by Gibson Research

I don’t have any personal experience with SpinRite, but the consensus on the tech forums I read seems to be that Steve Gibson is a crank. That said, although Gibson overhypes the program, it apparently does work. Mostly.

iktmacbook:~ ian$ ls -l /
total 36517
drwxrwxr-x+ 103 root admin 3502 20 Oct 19:37 Applications
drwxrwxr-x@ 16 root admin 544 16 Jun 08:52 Developer
drwxrwxr-t+ 66 root admin 2244 17 Oct 14:33 Library
drwxr-xr-x@ 2 root wheel 68 23 Jun 07:19 Network
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 136 17 Oct 14:12 System
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 60 28 Mar 2008 User Guides And Information -> /Library/Documentation/User Guides and Information.localized
drwxr-xr-x 8 root admin 272 17 Oct 14:23 Users
drwxrwxrwt@ 6 root admin 204 20 Oct 19:38 Volumes
drwxr-xr-x@ 39 root wheel 1326 17 Oct 14:10 bin
drwxrwxr-t@ 2 root admin 68 23 Jun 07:19 cores
dr-xr-xr-x 3 root wheel 4344 20 Oct 12:37 dev
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root wheel 11 17 Oct 14:10 etc -> private/etc
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 1 20 Oct 12:37 home
-rw-r–r–@ 1 root wheel 18672224 1 Aug 06:49 mach_kernel
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 1 20 Oct 12:37 net
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root wheel 204 17 Oct 14:23 private
drwxr-xr-x@ 64 root wheel 2176 17 Oct 14:10 sbin
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root wheel 11 17 Oct 14:10 tmp -> private/tmp
drwxr-xr-x@ 12 root wheel 408 17 Oct 14:33 usr
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root wheel 11 17 Oct 14:10 var -> private/var

Users is the equivalent of the linux ‘home’ dir. The filesystem isn’t like a linux one though – it’s HFS+.