Mac & Apple · closed case · MHD-2025-6621
Ten Minutes to Mount, So I Pulled It Out.
Eleven years of recorded lessons, the ones she sends home with her pupils, travelled in the boot of a Wokingham piano teacher's car on that Backup Plus. One morning the volume took ten minutes or more with the wheel just spinning
, so she pulled the cable out, thinking the Mac had hung
. After two or three further goes it stopped appearing on anything at all
. No other copy existed.
Much the same fault? Call us.
0800 6890668
In everyday terms.
Before macOS will show a volume it must read the catalogue, and if those sectors lie on surface that is breaking down, each read becomes a long run of retries the Finder simply waits out. A ten-minute mount is not the Mac misbehaving, then; it is the disk describing its own fault. The unkind part is that the instinctive answer — unplug it, plug it in again — is the most damaging available, since every attempt drives the heads across the weakest ground once more, and an area merely slow in spring may be unreadable by summer.
What the bench used here.
How a job is handled →| Tool | Why we used it | What it brings |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Imaged on gentle settings, with mounting excluded from the start | Head map first, then head-by-head reads, holding resets, timeouts and the power line steady |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Brought up the HFS+ volume from the image, catalogue intact | Reads the awkward filesystems others stumble over: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS, Btrfs |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Used firmware access to find the failing band under the catalogue | Reaches the vendor-specific commands that ordinary ATA has no way of issuing |
The lab work.
Nothing gets plugged in once it arrives
From booking-in onwards the Seagate spoke only to bench hardware and was never shown an operating system again. Firmware access laid the fault out clearly: a spreading band of failing sectors sitting precisely over the region HFS+ reserves for its catalogue. That accounts for the ten-minute mounts, and for the day it stopped answering.
The catalogue first, at walking pace
Order mattered more than speed here. Catalogue and metadata regions came off first, slowly, retries capped, since it is those regions that give the recordings back their pupil names and their dates; the audio followed afterwards in bulk. It is worth recording that pulling the cable had done no harm whatsoever.
Reassemble the volume from the image
Every stage of the rebuild ran on the completed image, not on the drive, which is the difference between an archive that is still filed by pupil and by year and a mound of anonymous fragments. Names, folders and dates survived alongside the audio.
How the job closed.
It went back to her in its own folder structure, and she played lessons from three separate years before she signed the job off. Nine recordings from the worst of the band returned truncated; all nine are listed.
More of the jobs we've closed.
Other cases involving Macs.
Does any of that match your case?
Nothing needs deciding until the diagnosis is back: switch the device off, send it in, and let the findings settle it.