I have an 80GB Fujitsu 2.5" hard drive that died about a day ago and had nothing backed up. Is it possible to retrieve data off of it somehow.
Mac – How to recover data from unreadable hard drive
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You could use ddrescue to try to clone the raw volume (there are some notes on running it under OS X on tinyapps.org). It basically tries to read over & over, getting as much as possible from the disk.
This isn't ideal for your situation, since it 1) needs enough free disk space (either a volume or a disk image) to hold the entire drive, including free space (i.e. if it was a 200GB drive with 10GB of files, you need 200GB to hold the clone); and 2) it doesn't tell you which files it couldn't read (you can look at the log and see what blocks it hasn't been able to read, but figuring out what files those blocks are part of is not trivial).
The good news about is that, thanks to its log file, if it missed something you need (and you haven't modified the target volume at all -- mounting readonly is recommended), you can just run it again and it'll pick up where it left off, and keep hammering on the difficult blocks until they give up their data.
Okay, so I think I've solved the problem and thought I'd post this up just in case anyone runs into similar issues...
I've downloaded a program Data Rescue 3, and I'm scanning the drive for deleted files. The program seems easy to use although I found that if you want to scan your internal drive (as in my case), you'll need to have another external drive plugged in as the software won't let you restore to the same drive you're recovering from.
When you run the software, select your internal drive to scan off then select the deleted files scan. When prompted, select your external drive to work off.
I'll post my results, success or failure, in the comments soon.
Screenshot of results:
Best Answer
SSDs don't come in an 80GB size (that I've seen -- usually multiples of 32GB). It may be possible depending on why the drive dies. If its a mechanical failure, then you could take the drive to a specialty computer repair shop (try local before the big stores), and they should be able to help you with diagnosing the actual issue. Since the data is stored magnetically, (if the drive data is not corrupt) you can retrieve the data but you may have to remove the platters and put into a new HD unit with working mechanics... this might cost quite a bit of money -- you'd need a clean room to be safe.
Bottom-line, the data is retrievable (most likely) but the cost may prevent you from getting it back.