MacBook Pro SSD Data Recovery Help!

[DownUnder]

Apple Genius appointment may be your best bet if you aren't pretty handy in the Apple OS.

If you are handy:
- Boot from an external drive, see what you can read on the internal drive. Hope it's just part of the internal drive that has the OS and you can see and read your files.
- Boot from an external drive, use a program to try to fix the internal drive.
- Boot from external drive, use a file recovery program. If the directory is corrupt, program may well be able to connect the data chains to give you a lot of files. You'll have the data (images) but problem is that all the directory information is gone (file name, date modified, etc.). You may still have the EXIF info which should be all you need for image files.
Good luck with all this.

Good advice from the (Kentucky?) Colonel. My own cautionary tale may serve as an example.

We are a Mac household - I run two Macbook Air laptops and my partner had a Pro. All three were bought from a reliable local shop in 2017 and 2019.

My two Airs have consistently worked well, even the one I dragged all over Southeast Asia on my wanderings.

My partner's Pro suddenly popped off last September. It was turned on and went Pop! (literally), and that was it. There were many vital work-related files and folders in it, so after home-tinkering a bit with it, without success, we took it back to the shop to be 'revived'.

Essentially, the shop expert followed Colonel Moran's third point and managed to retrieve all the files/folders except one - the most valuable of all - which had to be rewritten from memory and scribbled notes. All photos were safely salvaged.

The cost was over A$400, which is more than half what we paid for the laptop, a 2014 model. We did opt to not have the deceased Pro rebuilt, as we were advised it would likely expire in a year or less, from what the repair expert called "component stress", the strain of new parts installed on an older system.

The Pro was replaced with a (also used) Dell laptop of similar vintage, so it was back to Windows for us. The Dell has worked well since. Now everything gets backed up on two 2TB portable disks (Western Digital).

Once burned, twice shy, as the old saying goes...

 

[Godfrey]

Can an external hard drive function in lieu of the internal one? So that if I wanted to have 1TB instead of, say, a built-in 256GB, it can be done by using an external drive that would work just as transparently as the on-board one?

I'm guessing that such is not the case, and that any external hard drive for my iMac or Macbook Pro would be just exactly what I already have: One external drive for Time Machine, and a second one I use for photo backup, if I remember to use it, but it doesn't serve the purpose of substituting for my internal drive, because I have to deliberately send to it any image I want it to store.

An external hard drive on macOS can be configured to be as transparent a boot-up drive as the internal drive. Format and configure the external drive to be a bootable macOS drive, then in the System Preferences you use the Startup Disk tool to set it to be the default startup volume. Obviously, you need to have that drive connected and powered on before you start the computer in order for the low-level boot sequence to find it and startup from it.

I maintain backup, bootable drives like this for a couple of older operating system revisions for my older (2012) Mac mini, in order to work around various older software incompatibility issues on a couple of old things I still use infrequently.

The only issue that arises is that external drives will only operate at the speed whatever hardware connection protocol you use to connect them allows, which is often not as fast as the internal drive bus. An external drive with a 1T capacity connected via USB 2.0 is going to take a very long time to start up and you might find some apps tedious to use with such a slow protocol. Drives connected via Thunderbolt, USB 3.1, or FireWire 800 ports will operate much more seamlessly.

You can chain up to 64 FireWire drives, use USB hubs to connect a couple of dozen USB drives, and chain at least 6 Thunderbolt drives, all with very little degradation of performance given what those hardware protocols will allow. Any one of those external drives can be a boot drive. 😀

G

 

[jordan.dickinson]

Thank you Godfrey! I have a company looking at this drive and have my fingers crossed. Hopefully they are as informed and resourceful as the folks here on RFF!

 

[willie_901]

...
Bottom line. Use SSD in your machine because it is fast. Back up data (or images, etc.) often to external non-SSD drives for best protection. Now, many of us have external SSD drives nowadays. Keep in mind their shortcomings.

Sage advice.

SSD storage is based on the principles of quantum mechanical tunneling. To create a 1 bit state electrons tunnel into the storage area of one transistor. Transistors with without stored electrons represent a 0 bit state.

SSDs data storage relies on floating-gate (FG) MOSFET transistors. These devices retain (write) or emit (read) electric charge (electrons). FG flash devices use relatively high levels of electric charge to dramatically increase the probability electrons will flow into a a region of the transistor called a floating gate. This is the QM tunneling step. So, not all the available electrons reach the FG. But enough do to store a useful charge level. The probabilities involved are amplitude probabilities which behave differently than all other types of probability.

The FG charge is isolated from the transistor circuity until it is read (detected). This is how the 1 bit state is stored. Reading the charge is a low energy process. This means the stored FG charge can survive a high number of read processes.

Using QM tunneling storage has three disadvantages.

First, the high charge applied to the transistor during each write cycle ever so slightly degrades the FG's electrical isolation properties. This limits the number of reliable read-write cycles.

QM tunneling is a two way street. The stored electrons can also tunnel out of the FG! Eventually the charge will deplete to a level that reads as a 0 bit state. The probability of depletion tunneling is very low. However write degradation increases the probability for depletion tunneling. This limits the storage reliability even when the data has not been read!

Third: in case of electrical failure once the electrical charge is gone (becomes similar or less than the, circuit noise levels), there is no way to know if a storage cell once was a 1 or a 0 bit state. Data recovery is not possible.

 

[rulnacco]

Can an external hard drive function in lieu of the internal one? So that if I wanted to have 1TB instead of, say, a built-in 256GB, it can be done by using an external drive that would work just as transparently as the on-board one?

I'm guessing that such is not the case, and that any external hard drive for my iMac or Macbook Pro would be just exactly what I already have: One external drive for Time Machine, and a second one I use for photo backup, if I remember to use it, but it doesn't serve the purpose of substituting for my internal drive, because I have to deliberately send to it any image I want it to store.

Yes! Absolutely. And that will rejuvenate an older machine.

In fact, I am typing right now on a 2013 27-inch iMac which is booted from an external SSD, which makes it much faster.

I use Carbon Copy Cloner (https://bombich.com) to back up all my stuff. I actually use the iMac's internal hard disk drive to back up my SSD nightly. That way, if the external SSD does fail, all I have to do is unplug it and just boot up from the iMac's internal drive, and it will act exactly like nothing has changed (although it will, of course, be slower, which is why I'm using the SSD in the first place). Carbon Copy Cloner can make a bootable startup disk, so my iMac's internal HD is an exact, bootable copy of my SSD.

I have a couple of 8TB hard drives attached to the iMac, and after I finish editing photos, I archive them on to one of the drives, and then Carbon Copy Cloner backs them up to the other drive (again, nightly) as I sleep.

Whenever (if) my external SSD finally does fail, it won't be a problem--my iMac's internal HDD will be an exact clone of it, so I can just run from it until I replace the external SSD (and just clone the internal HDD back to it) for the speed boost.

 

[Godfrey]

While relying upon CCC is not a bad thing, the authors of CCC have been very transparent about the difficulties for an external vendor that the latest revisions of macOS pose, and what the future direction is.

https://bombich.com/blog/2021/05/19...dapting-recovery-strategies-evolving-platform

I know from my contacts within Apple that all of these efforts are to improve user security and system consistency, provide more power at lower prices, and that the price is convenience. I'm okay with that; others may not be.

G

 

[rulnacco]

While relying upon CCC is not a bad thing, the authors of CCC have been very transparent about the difficulties for an external vendor that the latest revisions of macOS pose, and what the future direction is.

https://bombich.com/blog/2021/05/19...dapting-recovery-strategies-evolving-platform

I know from my contacts within Apple that all of these efforts are to improve user security and system consistency, provide more power at lower prices, and that the price is convenience. I'm okay with that; others may not be.

G

Thanks for that info, I hadn't seen it before--I appreciate your drawing it to my attention.

It won't bother me, though--I'm sticking with Mojave for the present and the foreseeable future. The reason is that I use legacy versions of Photoshop and Lightroom--the cloud versions have no appeal to me, and I'm not at all interested in supporting that model, I have a few other very useful apps (Tex Edit Plus) that are 32-bit and which won't have 64-bit versions, and most importantly, I use my MacBook with an ancient Sinarback 54M on my Hasselblad V to shoot digital medium format. The CaptureShop software for that back definitely won't run on anything newer than Mojave, and there will never be a version that does.

While I applaud Apple's efforts to make our devices and data more secure, it really sounds like they're also making life more difficult for those of us who know how to maintain our own systems and hardware ourselves, and who want to be able to continue to do that with some flexibility. Sounds like when I do need to "upgrade" at some point, it may also be time to look at migrating beyond Apple.

 

[Trask]

Sounds like when I do need to "upgrade" at some point, it may also be time to look at migrating beyond Apple.

As a long-time Mac user — I began with and still have a Power Computing machine from the mid 90’s — I’d be interested to know what migrating beyond Apple means these days. While my wife has a nice MacBook Pro that’s “only” 7 or 8 years old, I do a lot of work on an older MacBook 4.1. I’m thinking of getting a new Apple machine with an M1 chip when the new models come out later this year (?), but like others I’ll need to keep my old MacBook around to run programs that won’t run on newer machines.

Or should I be looking elsewhere? Is there a hardware solution that would permit continued use of older programs written for Mac, but with a non-Mac machine of some sort? Is there something one can do like this in Linux?

I’m 70 now, and don’t think I need a lot of the bells and whistles a new Apple machine would bring me, not because I disdain those capabilities but because I just don’t think my interests at this point in life align with a lot of what younger buyers expect to find in a new machine (for example, I don’t play online games).
So I’d be curious what an alternative to Apple looks like.

 

[john_s]

........
So I’d be curious what an alternative to Apple looks like.....
.

Whatever it might be, it would involve a lot of work, and I for one am too old for that. I just make sure I've got access to some old machines (Windows in my case) that will run my old programs.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

I can make just about any computer designed for Windows run DOS with the Pharlap DOS extenders. The trick is to get a large SATA drive to format as FAT-32. Freedos FDISK does that, then DOS 7.1 from Win98 will format it as bootable. 2.7GHz I5 Toughbook running DOS on a 512GByte SATA drive with USB support in the BIOS. Also dual-boots XP. My oldest working computers (Pentium Pro) used on a regular basis are from 1996, the lower-density 1GByte drive is 30 years old. Still works, but keep 3 drives in that Tower. I have 40 year old 5.25" floppies that are still readable.

I use Macrium Reflect for stand-alone image backups for everything from the 512GByte FAT-32 drives through to WIN10 on an I7. Microsoft has bricked my Win10 machine, stand-alone image restore fixed the problem. I use a CF copier and and SD copier for my bootable cards for embedded systems. The SD copier is nice for dropping in the camera bag and backing up an SD card quickly, runs on batteries.

 

[Godfrey]

There are other computer systems that work fine for the people who like and/or use them. None are perfect (including Apple computer systems) and all get the job done one way or another.

I can't advise what will work best to make anyone else happy; I'm happy enough just using Apple equipment the way it was designed to be used. Whatever kind of constraints there might be, or might come to be, I have always found a sensible way to get what I needed done that was low effort and highly reliable, and didn't break my budget.

I've had to change the way I did things now and then over the past 40 years of using computing equipment as an integral part of my photography, writing, bookkeeping, music, and other activities. I suspect that I'll have to do the same for the next 10 or 20 years, or whatever span of time I'm granted as well, and that my needs will change too as I continue down the slope.

I'll adapt as time, and needs, and what's available to do the job changes. One thing I can say for certain: The human mind is far far more capable of change, of adapting to change, than any specific brand or type of computing equipment. 🙂

G

 

[jordan.dickinson]

Thanks to all who contributed suggestions and help on this issue. Unfortunately, after sending this out to 2 major data recovery companies in the U.S. my SSD is officially marked as irrevocably damaged and no files can be retrieved. I'm shocked, since the computer just wouldn't restart after a hard reboot. Meanwhile criminals are brought up on murder charges and other things when police retrieve files off of burned/drowned/smashed hard drives that have been deliberately and excessively damaged.

I don't know if I ever want to buy another Mac at this point, and it's a huge bummer. That said, anyone else reading this, just use my bad luck and my poor file backup management as a cautionary tale. I have never had a hard drive fail on me, and I ultimately thought that upgrading to an SSD was the safer choice after using traditional platter based hard drives for years. Now I'm not so sure.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

It's a question of cost and how badly the data is required. I doubt that commercial firms would get many customers if they quoted $10,000 and more for their services. Watch the show "Air Disasters" and you will see some of the work required to recover data from flight recorders. For anything important- I back up to two separate external drives and often keep copies on second and third computers.

So many decades of using computers- I have files from 1981 on my computer.

 

[Godfrey]

...
I don't know if I ever want to buy another Mac at this point, and it's a huge bummer. That said, anyone else reading this, just use my bad luck and my poor file backup management as a cautionary tale. I have never had a hard drive fail on me, and I ultimately thought that upgrading to an SSD was the safer choice after using traditional platter based hard drives for years. Now I'm not so sure.

Why is your confidence in the Apple macOS systems at issue when the fault was that you did not properly keep a backup of your data? Apple provides all the solutions you need to do that, recommends that you do it everywhere, and provides the software to do it for free ... All you had to do was use them.

The blame seems misplaced. Take it as an education, for use with whatever computing system you buy to replace that one: ALWAYS protect your data with backup.

It's a hard lesson but it's not the end of the world.

G

 

[jordan.dickinson]

I already know this Godfrey, and those comments are really not helpful. I took full responsibility if you see my references to mismanagement of my backups all over my posts. I'm just ultimately disappointed in the catastrophic hardware failure when I didn't mishandle the computer or anything. The saying goes "you get what you paid for" and what I paid for is hardware that just crashed and ultimately turned my whole computer into garbage when it had minimal use, not to mention my files being lost. When I brought it into the Apple store, they took 5 mins out of their day, and told me just to buy a new one. This $2k+ suggestion in addition to my files lost is a lot to digest. As we all know, these things are not cheap, so with the hardware failing (never had this happen with any other computer), and Apple telling me to "just spend another $2k+", yeah my faith in their product is a bit shaken.

And yes, I know I should have been more on top of the backup but as I said in my original post, I had ordered a massive external hard drive for backing this up. It crashed while I was literally a few days away from the delivery of the drive. I posted the last message to simply complete the thread and send a cautionary tale to others not to do what I did, so how is that misplaced blame? Also, I'm heartbroken at this loss of files, so rubbing it in is really not helpful. Those comments could easily have just been kept to yourself. Nothing against you, but still. I realize you were trying your best to be helpful in the above comments, so I do appreciate that. It's just too fresh to feel "ok" about losing the files and out an expensive laptop.

 

[JeffS7444]

I do a lot of work on an older MacBook 4.1.

Nothing that you can't afford to lose I hope! You are talking about computers which were discontinued circa 2008 after all. If your older software is Apple's Aperture or Adobe's Lightroom 6, the time to say goodbye is long overdue.

Outside of Apple, I think you have a pretty good idea what's out there: Windows, Android, Chromebooks, and a smattering of other various Unix-like operating systems for x86 and ARM hardware with Raspberry Pi being a popular platform for the latter. Windows for ARM exists, but outside of some Surface tablets, I don't know that it's particularly common.

 

[JoeV]

Thanks to all who contributed suggestions and help on this issue. Unfortunately, after sending this out to 2 major data recovery companies in the U.S. my SSD is officially marked as irrevocably damaged and no files can be retrieved. I'm shocked, since the computer just wouldn't restart after a hard reboot. Meanwhile criminals are brought up on murder charges and other things when police retrieve files off of burned/drowned/smashed hard drives that have been deliberately and excessively damaged.

I don't know if I ever want to buy another Mac at this point, and it's a huge bummer. That said, anyone else reading this, just use my bad luck and my poor file backup management as a cautionary tale. I have never had a hard drive fail on me, and I ultimately thought that upgrading to an SSD was the safer choice after using traditional platter based hard drives for years. Now I'm not so sure.

SSDs don’t store data in magnetic fields, but charges in individual transistor floating gates. With a crashed magnetic drive the data is often still present in the sectors and hence can be restored; not so with SSDs.

Also, flash memory has a limit to the number of read/write cycles. They’re good for static data, things that don’t change much, but magnetic drives are better for dynamic data.

Also, a good backup system has at least two drives besides the primary.

 

[Rob-F]

Although my Macbook Pro with SSD is running fine, I will think twice about buy another one after reading this. The magnetic drive seems to be the better bet.

 

[robert blu]

I'm not expert as other people here are but I think a computer with internal SSD for operating system and the needed softwares and conventional hard disk for the data and for multiple backups seems me a good solution. As routine I replace my hard disk each 3 or 4 years.
Perhaps an additional backup in the cloud, I'm not so sure about it but it could be another idea.

Attention is anyway required, it happened me for an unknown reason at a certain monment my backup did not include the main hard disk! Probably during a system upgrading one little square box in the preferences was wrongly disabled! luckly I noticed it before anything wrong could happen. I learned to better check it in my routine!

 

[Sonnar Brian]

One question: Did the Computer itself die, or is it just the SSD?

If you put a different disk in the computer- does it work?

If the SSD is corrupt, the computer will not boot. If the computer itself malfunctioned and corrupted the SSD- that means both are dead. I've seen it both ways.

My Pentium 4 Gateway computers are starting to die, 2 of 4- but Hard Drives transplanted to another computer were Okay. 20 year mark. I had a Panasonic CF-51 give problems- had to reseat the CPU Heatsink.