I am using Mac OS X 10.5.7 on my MacBook Pro. Recently, I purchased a new portable 500 GB external hard drive. I bought it for replacing my old portable 160 GB external hard drive for storing some audio software project files and the audio sample library (approx. 85 GB). Additionally, I wanted to store my mp3 library (nearly 58GB) on this drive. I then connected the 160 GB drive through FireWire 400 and the new external drive through 2 USB cables. I copied the 85 GB audio software folder to the new drive without any problems. But, as I went ahead to drag and drop my mp3 library, I got a message stating that some of the audio files could not be read or written. At this stage, if I choose to skip or cancel, the system freezes and forces me to do a hard restart.
Assuming this to be minor corruption, I ran Disk Utility against the 160 GB drive. The scan completed successfully and reported no errors. Now, I erased the 500 GB external drive and tried to clone my 160 GB drive onto the 500 GB drive using the ‘Restore’ function of Disk Utility. This gave me the following error:
‘restore failure: could not restore due to input output error’
It seemed as if I had a long bunch of random mp3 files corrupt in the library. It was difficult to identify which files were corrupt and then isolate them from the rest. Every time I tried to copy a corrupt file, I had no option but to restart the machine. I could afford to lose those corrupt mp3s, but indeed wanted to repair the drive and recover all the valid data. I was looking for a free utility that would help me do this job better.
I ran through a number of resources on the web. On doing some extensive search, I came across dozens of third-party tools that were available in the free demo versions. I downloaded Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery and scanned my hard drive through this software. The software was able to retrieve 95% of my music collection. I could see all the files listed in the main interface. I went ahead to purchase the full version of this software. The advanced utility also supports recovery from USB flash drives, memory cards, iPods and optical media. Further, it is compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
Assuming this to be minor corruption, I ran Disk Utility against the 160 GB drive. The scan completed successfully and reported no errors. Now, I erased the 500 GB external drive and tried to clone my 160 GB drive onto the 500 GB drive using the ‘Restore’ function of Disk Utility. This gave me the following error:
‘restore failure: could not restore due to input output error’
It seemed as if I had a long bunch of random mp3 files corrupt in the library. It was difficult to identify which files were corrupt and then isolate them from the rest. Every time I tried to copy a corrupt file, I had no option but to restart the machine. I could afford to lose those corrupt mp3s, but indeed wanted to repair the drive and recover all the valid data. I was looking for a free utility that would help me do this job better.
I ran through a number of resources on the web. On doing some extensive search, I came across dozens of third-party tools that were available in the free demo versions. I downloaded Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery and scanned my hard drive through this software. The software was able to retrieve 95% of my music collection. I could see all the files listed in the main interface. I went ahead to purchase the full version of this software. The advanced utility also supports recovery from USB flash drives, memory cards, iPods and optical media. Further, it is compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
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