Mac drives · case closed · PLY-2025-0621
After Ten Minutes She Pulled the Cable.
The Backup Plus spent ten whole minutes showing me that spinning colour wheel
one morning, so she pulled the cable out, convinced the Mac had hung
. After two more attempts it would not appear anywhere at all
. She teaches piano in Newquay; the drive rode to lessons and home again in a car boot. Eleven years of recordings were on it: the copies she sends her pupils home with. Nowhere else held a set.
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Why it happens.
Her Mac would not show the volume until the catalogue had been read right through, and in her case it happened to lie over a weak stretch of surface that was on its way out. So those ten minutes belonged to the disk, not the computer: the same sectors asked for, refused, asked for again, with the Finder queueing up behind. Then things can escalate quickly. Unplug the drive, plug it back in, try one more time, and each go drags the heads back across the weakest area of the platter. Something that reads slowly in March may not read at all by April.
The equipment this job needed.
How the job runs →| The kit | Where it came in | Why we keep it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Copied it gently, keeping every operating system away from the volume | Scores every head before it starts, works one surface at a time, and holds resets, timeouts and power in check |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Built the HFS+ volume again off the image, catalogue intact | Mounts what other software will not: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs volumes |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Got in at service level and mapped the failing band below | Drops the disk into its maker's service mode, out of reach over plain ATA |
How it ran.
Booked in, and connected to no computer at all
Once it arrived, the Seagate went onto bench hardware and sat there. From that point on, nothing running an operating system was used anywhere near it. Service-level access found the problem right away: bad sectors growing outwards, directly under where HFS+ puts its catalogue. That explains the ten-minute wait, and the morning it stopped responding as well.
Take the metadata before the audio, and take it slowly
Getting the order right mattered more than speed here. The catalogue and metadata came off first, at low speed with retries kept short, because those small areas are what give each recording its name and lesson date. Next came the audio. One important thing to say here is that pulling the cable out did not cause any damage.
Every repair happened on the copy, none on the disk
No repairs were made to the Seagate; every operation was run against the finished image. Do it the other way round and instead of eleven years of recordings in folders by pupil and by year, you get a pile of files with no names. The names, the dates and the folder structure holding them came back along with the audio.
How it ended up.
Her folder tree came back exactly as she had built it, and she would not sign anything off until she had listened to lessons from three years either side of the fault. Nine recordings came back cut short, all from the worst part of that band, and each one is listed in the report.
Pages people tend to read next.
Other Apple jobs in the log.
Seeing the same thing?
Leave it switched off and post it in. Nothing happens until the diagnosis, which lists what can still be read and what cannot.