Monday 28 January 2013

How to secure both a failing Mac volume & data inside?

This time again the Mac disk utility showed up several error codes that made the doubt clear in my mind about the failing volumes. Navigating through Utilities—Applications--DiskUtility--FirstAid--VerifyDiskPermissions ends up displaying the below outcome. At the first glance, these errors won't even look familiar or understandable to a moderate user. Either only a geek or a software developer for Mac systems would be able to hunt out its real meaning for permission error codes. A person like me or a non-geek would succumb to such errors even before giving it a last try for repair.
Fig (1)

I am clear on this; Permissions on Mac are predefined and associated with each and every single files/folders. To perform a read-write operation, the permissions should be clearly stated for users to execute without a halt. Any errors on Disk Utility would show up only after the permissions are either damaged or redefined for OS X to understand. Such a case would invite logical disaster either in no time or will slowly crawl the Mac to the ultimate logical failure. Since permission errors are reported on time still they could malfunction the Mac OS X, it is the need of time to repair the corruption with the help of an alternative solution.  

“Had it been basic volume errors, Disk Utility must have fixed it.”

Further, the damaged hard drive (volumes) is at high risk of resulting in no mountable file systems, ceasing the user to access the data stored on the partition. This is a highly unfavorable situation where the drive along-with the data becomes prone to failure. The disk utility would let you know about the unmounted hard drive from the left panel by diminishing the hard drive icon. In this case, one can make attempts to at-least ensures the data recovery from unmounted drive with the help of an OS X file recovery program. Consider the below snapshot of a file recovery software that successfully scans an unmounted hard drive & previews the list of data to the user for recovery. If this attempt utilizes then trust this, user can feel bit relieved with securing the data from an unmounted hard drive. Otherwise, the integrity of the Mac hard drive is still in question which might demand for logical or physical repair. 

Video:How to recovered unmounted data on Mountain Lion






Logical Repair at the user's end is made through a volume repair utility which offers the user to back-up the data before moving ahead with the repair. Utility replaces damaged permissions & directory structures through building new ones. Further, it can also fix up 'Invalid Node Structure', 'Catalog files' and rest 'cryptic errors'.





Fig(2):-

An important point to be noted is, the volume repair utility would be only helpful in fixing out the logical damage done to the hard drive. Sadly, talking of a physical damage, no software would be of help other than the repair services. However, there are certain instances of hard drives which had bad sectors on their surfaces but with the help of Imaging, the data stored on the drive was successfully recovered although the drive still be required a helping hand.  




Fig (3): - Fig (1) errors sorted out