Problems recovering info from a crashed HD

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Paul Fuchs - 25 Nov 2007 21:04 GMT

I have a friend with a G4 PowerBook, in the 867 MHz range. She had
extensive business, financial, and personal records on the machine and
is highly organized. The machine started acting a little weird. I
told her to buy a small LaCie FW and back up her (40 GB) drive at least
once a week with CC Cloner. I told her that the internal drive may be
going bad, but if she backed it up and it crashed, then she could always
boot off the LaCie, and throw in a new drive in the PB. And then clone
the LaCie back.

Bad advice. While I was out of the country, the drive failed, but in
such a way that the back-up became totally corrupted as well. So she
sent off the internal drive and the LaCie to a company, who, at great
expense, recovered most of the original drive and transferred it to a
partition on the LaCie.

In the meantime, she obtained a much faster G4 PB in the 1.6 GHz range,
put another drive in the old one, and sold it. She is running 10.4.11
on her new machine.

She has two huge problems now. Her addressbook.app was quite large. I
thought that addressbook keeps its files compressed inside the
application file, so I just copied it over from the recovered LaCie
data. It opened fine but it only had 11 names as opposed to the 500
that were expected. Anyone have any idea what happened? Is there
anything that can be done?

The other problem is with iCal. She keeps very elaborate schedules in
iCal. She started a new schedule up, but she would like to incorporate
the old history into the new iCal file. If this is impossible, she
would at least like to be able to access the old one. Apparently, iCal
will only boot if it is in the application folder of the boot drive.
When I tried to boot the old iCal from the external, nothing
happened. (The recovered data is not on a bootable partition.) Maybe
it's corrupted. I guess she could put her new iCal in a safe place,
like on the desktop, copy the old one into the boot drive application
folder, and see what happens.

Does anyone have any ideas with how she can deal with these two
problems?

TIA

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Jim Glidewell - 29 Nov 2007 22:04 GMT

> I have a friend with a G4 PowerBook, in the 867 MHz range. She had
> extensive business, financial, and personal records on the machine and
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
> boot off the LaCie, and throw in a new drive in the PB. And then clone
> the LaCie back.

In the vast majority of cases, this will work. Unfortunately, the
problem with cloning is that if the corruption is undetected before the
next clone, you can trash your only good copy.

My sympathies to her.

> Bad advice. While I was out of the country, the drive failed, but in
> such a way that the back-up became totally corrupted as well. So she
> sent off the internal drive and the LaCie to a company, who, at great
> expense, recovered most of the original drive and transferred it to a
> partition on the LaCie.

Data recovery is *very* pricey. I know firsthand.

> In the meantime, she obtained a much faster G4 PB in the 1.6 GHz range,
> put another drive in the old one, and sold it. She is running 10.4.11
[quoted text clipped - 6 lines]
> that were expected. Anyone have any idea what happened? Is there
> anything that can be done?

Unless Apple is doing things *very* strangely with Addressbook, there
should be no user-generated address book data anywhere outside of her
home directory. (There may be some generic Apple addresses embedded
in the app itself, which would presumably be used to seed an empty
address DB for a new user).

Her addressbook data should be in:

~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook

which contains a number of files, including:

AddressBook.data

which I assume is the primary repository of the data.

I would immediately copy that directory off to a CD-R or something, and
then _carefully_ rename the existing AddressBook folder to
AddressBook.bad and then copying the (hopefully good)
address book folder into her Library/Application Support folder.

> The other problem is with iCal. She keeps very elaborate schedules in
> iCal. She started a new schedule up, but she would like to incorporate
[quoted text clipped - 6 lines]
> like on the desktop, copy the old one into the boot drive application
> folder, and see what happens.

Again, the data should be somewhere in her (original) home directory.

Again, it turns out, in ~/Library/Application Support (~ is her home
directory - i.e. /Users/Barbara)

G5:~/Library/Application Support jim$ ls -l iCal
total 136
drwxr-xr-x 12 jim jim 408 Mar 7 2006 Sources
-rw-r--r-- 1 jim jim 344 Oct 10 19:59 alarmsCache.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 jim jim 847 Nov 1 2005 iCal1-5-migration.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 jim jim 4030 Oct 10 19:59 nodes.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 jim jim 271 Nov 1 2005 sync.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 jim jim 49120 Oct 10 19:59 syncState.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 jim jim 313 Oct 10 19:59 todos-info.plist

What files do what is a little less clear, but again the idea is to
replace the directory in Applications Support with the old, recovered
directory contents.

Mac OS X is a multi-user system, and, for the most part, *everything*
associated with a single user should be contained inside their home
directory somewhere.

After replacing the iCal and AddressBook folders, I would suggest
logging out and back on, or even rebooting, just in case those
database files are held open for the user (so that it can check
for alarms, etc.)

Note that the above assumes that the files that were on the disks
that went through the recovery process were restored fully intact.
I'd say there is a good chance of that. It also sounds like you
have *two* disks that you might recover from - did they do file
recovery on both the internal *and* the clone backup? If so, try
with both.

Please *be careful* - after all this grief, it would be a tragedy
to lose the files because you copied a bad folder over a good one.
Make multiple backup copies of all this stuff. Burn a couple CD's,
with a good naming convention so you can tell what came from where.

> Does anyone have any ideas with how she can deal with these two
> problems?

There you go. Do let us know if you are able to help her recover.

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Paul Fuchs - 03 Dec 2007 23:38 GMT

> > I have a friend with a G4 PowerBook, in the 867 MHz range. She had
> > extensive business, financial, and personal records on the machine and
[quoted text clipped - 106 lines]
>
> There you go. Do let us know if you are able to help her recover.

Thank you. I was suppose to go over and try to help her on Sunday
evening, but then we had our weekly power outage on our island so we
will have to reschedule.

_p

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Jim Glidewell - 04 Dec 2007 16:39 GMT

>> Mac OS X is a multi-user system, and, for the most part, *everything*
>> associated with a single user should be contained inside their home
[quoted text clipped - 25 lines]
> evening, but then we had our weekly power outage on our island so we
> will have to reschedule.

I realize some time has gone by, which means she's probably started
to rebuild various things, but...

Probably the *best* way to deal with a recovery like this is to
use the migration assistant (or manual means) to copy her *entire*
home directory from the old, recovered disk to the new one.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that the disks that
went through the recovery process are _gold_ - do not use them for
scratch space, do not wipe them, etc. Always copy the data _from_
them to somewhere else.

Be aware that the migration assistant will probably completely
overwrite an existing home directory (my conservative assumption)
so have a backup of that from her current primary drive if you
decide to try it. At this point, I would probably suggest doing
things folder by folder, as I suggested above.

If you have any Mac technical resources in the area that you can call
upon, I'd say now is the time. Two heads are better than one in
a situation like this.

Feel free to email me if you get stuck.

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Paul Fuchs - 15 Dec 2007 23:10 GMT

> >> Mac OS X is a multi-user system, and, for the most part, *everything*
> >> associated with a single user should be contained inside their home
[quoted text clipped - 49 lines]
>
> Feel free to email me if you get stuck.

Thanks Jim. After some work, we were able to recover her address book
and iCal to her satisfaction.

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Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / December 2007

Problems recovering info from a crashed HD