Recover Data from Mac Volumes with Severely Damaged File System

Posted on May 9, 2012 by admin

In the course of data storage and retrieval, file system has a major role to play. It is because of the files system, your Mac machine is able to retrieve files from the system hard drive with their names or by giving locations. File system is indeed a set of defined attributes, according to which data is being stored on the hard drive and is retrieved as well.

Sometimes, the file system of your Mac gets corrupt and the data in the corresponding volumes become completely inaccessible. For such situations Mac data recovery utilities, which can help recovering lost data from any instance of data loss or inaccessibility?

Every operating system is compatible with a different set of file systems and in this context, the recent versions of Mac use HFS, HFS+ file system based volumes. When you start the operating system or try to access any data from the volumes, the OS tries to learn data areas from the file system entries. But, if due to any unexpected reason the file system gets corrupt, the OS fails to read the data entries in the file system. This results in the inaccessibility of the data in the hard drive.

There can be a number of different reasons behind file system corruption, including virus/malware infection, unexpected system shut down, operating system malfunction or contradiction with any previously installed hardware/software. In case, if the file system of your Mac has been corrupt, it shows various error messages on the screen. One such error message can be read as below:

“The Finder can’t complete the operation because some data can’t be read or written. (Error code -36)”

The error message usually appears, while performing any copy or move operation following file system corruption. The more you try to perform operations on your Mac, the more the problem aggravates, resulting in the complete inaccessibility of the drive.

For such situations, Mac has an inbuilt application, ‘Disk Utility’. With this utility, you can repair corrupt partitions. If it fails, you can also use another useful utility, ‘fsck’, which is meant to verify and resolve file system corruption issues.

But, in case of severe corruption to the file system, none of these utilities is able to recover your data and you need to take the help of any third party Mac recovery utility. There are many such Mac data recovery utilities available, which can recover all your data from any instance of file system corruption.

Stellar Phoenix Mac allows you to verify the credibility of the software by previewing the recoverable data. Moreover, this software is completely risk-free in data recovery process and brings back your data in their original format.

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Effects of Kernel Panics on Mac OS X Stability and Various Troubleshooting Methods

Posted on May 2, 2012 by admin

Kernel panics are one of the few downsides of Mac OS X that continue to cause problems for a majority of us. Most of them end up with a black screen that prompts to restart the Mac system on every boot.

Generally, the users who migrate from PowerPC to Intel frequently face such problems due to incompatible drivers and OS X bugs. Kernel panics often relate to directory failures or corruption cases on your hard drive. In such situations, you may face severe data loss. To easily work around this problem, you should go for Mac recovery through advanced third-party software.

Let us consider a real-time scenario. Suppose you use Mac OS X 10.6.7 with kernel version Darwin 10.7.0. You have been running your Mac system in normal boot mode. You frequently receive the following message on your screen:

‘Your computer needs to be restarted’

When you restart the system, you get a message asking you to repair the disk.

The above behavior usually denotes a fatal system crash or kernel panic. This could happen due to any of the following reasons:

•    Your RAM is either defective or incompatible with the OS X version.
•    You have installed a third-party kernel extension that is incompatible with your version of OS X.
•    You have corrupt or damaged device drivers.
•    Your hard disk has bad sectors or there are incorrect permissions on various system components.

In order to fix this issue, you need to follow the given procedure:

•    Initially, restart your Mac either through the Restart button or by holding down and then pressing the Power button.
•    Start your system in Safe mode by holding down the Shift key and then choosing the Safe Boot option. In case you have a third-party external keyboard, you should use an Apple keyboard.
•    If the computer starts up without a problem, restart the system and then run ‘Software Update’.
•    If the kernel panic occurs when booting in Safe mode, it may be due to a hardware issue. In this case, you need to check your peripheral devices, internal RAM, and third-party hardware.

If you still face more kernel panics, you might face serious corruption on your hard disk and run the risk of a potential data loss. In such circumstances, you should safely recover Mac data using professional third-party software. These utilities are adept at recovering every piece of lost, deleted, or inaccessible information from your hard drive, including data, documents, pictures, videos, etc.

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Ways to Resolve Flashing Question Mark in Mac and Mac Data Recovery

Posted on April 11, 2012 by admin

Sometimes, while trying to boot your Mac, the machine shows a flashing question mark and fails to start. Your Mac operating system shows the flashing question mark indicating the fact that either it has failed to locate the boot disk or the system software needed to start the system.

Though such a situation is quite unexpected, it especially occurs after an improper system shutdown. You can try resolving the problem by running Disk Utility to repair the troubled Mac hard drive. But, in case Disk Utility fails, you can take the help of any third party Mac data recovery software to recover your inaccessible data back.

Generally, in case of delayed booting of your Mac, you need to reselect the startup disk by going to the Startup Disk preferences. It is common to receive a flashing question mark, when there is no startup disk selected. In many cases, the problem spontaneously gets resolved after re-selecting the correct startup disk.

At times, Mac shows flashing question mark, if the track pad or mouse button is pressed during the booting operation. It is better to check this out before proceeding towards any other resolution. Simply shutdown your Mac by pressing the power button and disconnect keyboard, mouse, and other peripherals. Again, turn on the machine and check whether the flashing question mark still persists. If the problem is still there, follow the below steps:

•    Try to boot your Mac by selecting the Mac OS X startup disk from the Startup Manager. Remember to hold the Option key, while restarting. If the Mac successfully boots, restart again and check, whether the flashing question mark is still there.
•    If the problem still remains, try to boot the system from your Mac OS X installation disc. Restart the computer by holding ‘C’ key from the key board.
•    Choose Disk Utility from the Utilities menu and select your Mac OS X disk from the left side of the window. Remember not to click the ‘Continue’ button.
•    Under the tab; ‘First Aid’, select the option, ‘Repair Disk’ to verify and repair.
•    After completion of the repairing process, try to boot the Mac normally.

If after performing all the above operations, the problem still persists, you need to format the hard drive and make fresh installation of the OS. As formatting will erase all the data from the drive, you need to restore data from the recently created back-up disk.

But, if you do not have any backup available, you can still bring back all your data with the help of any Mac Data Recovery software. These software are completely reliable and efficiently recover all your lost, deleted, or formatted data in their original format. Importantly, they are easy-to-use and even a non-technical user can easily perform data recovery.

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Mac File System Corruption Problem? – Resolve Now

Posted on March 26, 2012 by admin

You must have come around the term file system, while initializing your Mac hard drive or creating new volumes in it. Mac mainly uses two different file systems, such as HFS and HFS+. These file systems are the set of guidelines according to which files are stored in the hard drive and accessed from it.

Also, it is because of the file system, the operating system identifies files, directories with their names and you are able to access them smoothly. Imagine, if the file system gets any problem, the OS can never identify the data areas and thus the entire data in the hard drive become completely inaccessible.

There can be a number of reasons behind the corruption of the file system, such as unexpected system shut down, virus infection, operating system malfunction, contradiction with installed hardware or software etc.

In some occasions, if the file system of your Mac has already been corrupt and you are trying to boot the computer, it fails showing some error message on the boot screen. The error message that you may receive can be read as below:

“File system dirty, run fsck”

Now, as the Mac has failed to boot any further, all your precious files in the hard drive remain completely inaccessible. Here, you can follow the below resolution steps to resolve this file system corruption issue:

•    First of all, try running your Mac in Safe Mode and verify, whether the problem is still there or not. Sometime, such errors are timely and do not appear again.
•    If the problem exists, run Disk Utility from the Mac system disk that had come with your Mac. Under the First Aid tab, choose the troubled Mac drive and repair.
•    If Disk Utility fails, run the ‘FSCK’ utility as suggested in the error message itself. Remember to attach the hard drive to another working Mac machine and run FSCK manually from Single-User mode.

Note: ‘FSCK’ is a utility that is popularly used to check the consistency of file system and resolve, if there is any problem.

Even after performing the above operations, if the problem still persists, you need to opt for any advanced Mac file recovery software. Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery is an innovative utility to recover lost or inaccessible files from any instance of data loss, including that of file system problems.

Apart from being efficient, the software is reliable enough to recover all your data in their original structure. Moreover, with interactive graphical user interfaces, the software can be easily used by any user, even without much technical knowledge.

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Steps to Resolve Time Machine Error 109

Posted on March 16, 2012 by admin

Time Machine is a widely used Mac data backup utility developed by Apple. The Mac users, who want to take back-up of their important data through Time Machine, usually need one wireless network-attached drive to store the backed up content. Many users opt for Airport Extreme Base Stations (AEBS), an Apple developed wireless storage device to use with Time Machine.

But, unfortunately in many occasions, when you use AEBS with Time Machine, the Time Machine encounters problems and the data in the backup drive becomes completely inaccessible. However, there are certain workarounds for this problem, performing which you can resolve the problem and will be able to regain access to your precious data in the Time Machine backup drive.

When Time Machine encounters any problem working with AEBS, it flashes many unexpected error messages, one of which can be written as below:

“Time Machine Could Not Complete Backup” – “The backup disk image ‘/Volumes/my_name_backup-1/my_name’s mimi mac.sparsebundle” could not be accessed (error 109)”

Though the exact reason behind the above error is quite unclear, still it is the corruption with the sparsebundle file that is believed to have caused the error. Sparsebundle or .sparsebundle is the disk image bundle, which stores the backup onto AEBS or Time Capsule.

Moreover, Apple does not officially suggest AEBS to be used with Time Machine and rather suggests Time Capsule, which is another wireless storage drive.

Steps to resolve Time Machine Error – 109:

•    Close all applications, currently running in the system along with Time Machine.

•    Connect your Time Machine backup drive to the Mac.

•    Go to the hard drive mount point by typing the below command at the command prompt:
/CD/VOLUMES/BACKUP_DRIVE

Note: Here, ‘BACKUP_DRIVE’ is the name of your Time Machine backup drive. If the     drive name contains any space, remember to put the entire name within quotes.

•    Connect the ‘sparsebundle’ through the disk image management utility as below. It is important to note that if the sparsebundle has been corrupt, it may take longer time.
hdiutil attach -nomount -readwrite -noautofsck -noverify-    BACKUPNAME.sparsebundle

•    The above operation will give you information regarding the connected drive as below:
/dev/disk2 Apple_partition_scheme
/dev/disk2s1 Apple_partition_map
/dev/disk2s2 Apple_HFSX

•    Check and repair the file system of the drive by running the ‘fsck’ utility as below:
fsck_hfs – rfy /dev/BACKUP_DRIVE

•    If fsck fails, run Disk Utility to try repairing the drive. Drag the sparsebundle image file to the Disk Utility area and select ‘Repair Disk’ option under the tab, ‘First Aid’.

•    Lastly, cross check the integrity of BACKUP_DRIVE once again by running the ‘Repair Disk’ command.

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Deleted Important File? Do not worry – Files can be Easily Recovered

Posted on February 9, 2012 by admin

Loss of important files due to deletion or formatting of the media has been one of the most common data loss incidents, faced by any computer user. Sometimes, the files are deleted accidentally, whereas at times you delete them intentionally, only to realize their importance after deletion. Though Mac is considered to be laced with so many advanced features, it lacks in providing the one to recover deleted files. But to sooth your worries over losing valuable files to deletion or formatting of the Mac media, there are many Mac File Recovery utilities available to recover the lost files back.

Mac has been designed with the most recent features and is popularly marketed by Apple as the best at all those things that you do with your computer every day. This is the reason that Macs are used by almost every class of computer users, including students, software developers, financial advisers, authors, graphics designers, professional photographers and home users.

As the users know that their Mac can deal with many things, they store all kinds of data on it, such as documents, spread-sheets, photos, music, videos, movies and many more. Some of these files are important with respect to money, as they hold much business critical information, which has gathered over months or years of hard work. At the same time, you may have some memorable image or video files, which are important because you can never recreate them, once they get lost.

Unfortunately, there are occasions in which these valuable files get accidentally deleted.  Even in some incidents, you lose your precious files to virus infection or accidental formatting of the Mac media.

Many users believe that once a file gets deleted from the system, it can never be recovered. But, there is an interesting fact about this partial truth. When files are deleted or the media gets formatted, Mac operating system removes all the entries of files from the system and marks the memory as free space. After this the newly created free space can be used by other files, you save on to the drive. Thus, once you save new files on those memory spaces, the deleted files can never be recovered.

However, until you save any new file on the drive, from which your files have been deleted, the content of those files remain exactly on the same location and can be recovered, using any file recovery Mac utility.

These utilities are programmed with many advanced innovative algorithms, which locate the lost entries of the deleted files and thus recover them back. With completely read only recovery approach, these utilities retrieve the files with their exact format as well as names. Moreover, as the utilities come with highly interactive graphical user interfaces, they can be used by any user by self, without any technical assistance.

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What’s new in Mac Data Recovery v5?

Posted on February 7, 2012 by admin

The all new version of Stellar Data Recovery v5 overcomes all the cons of previous version.  Its more advance with 30% enhancement in speed and world’s one and only software that can recover recently deleted  files with their original filenames.

Major Changes:

  • New and more interactive Graphical user Interface with better usability.
  • Data recovery from optical media.
  • Option to perform ‘Raw recovery’ in case of severe corruption.
  • Recovery of recently deleted files with names.
  • On-the-fly storage media detection.
  • Detailed description of media, scan information or image file selected to perform data recovery.
  • Update wizard to keep application up-to-date.
  • Enhanced ‘Preferences’ option.
  • Optimized scanning process with almost 30% enhancement in scanning speed.
  • Listing of recently created images and saved scan results along with option to browse for saved scanned information or image file not included in the history.
  • Option to add file signatures.
  • Enhanced ‘File Preview’ with support for almost all file types and on-the-fly preview while scanning is in process.
  • Enhanced ‘File Tree View’ with separate tabs of ‘Classic View’, ‘File List View’ and ‘Filter View’.
  • Enhanced ‘Filter’ option with added flexibility of specifying date range and size along with file types.
  • Preview of files in a pop-up with an option to view file content in full screen.
  • Addition of new file types.
  • Support of volumes with size greater than 2TB.

The software has already participated in MacWorld 2012 and gained a huge appraisal from Mac tech groups. Also, been declared as the product of month by Mouseworld Now.

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Tips to fix ‘no mountable file systems’ – Mac disk corruption

Posted on February 3, 2012 by admin

Disk imaging is performed to create a sector-by-sector image of any data storage device. The process makes an exact replica of the storage media, copying all the contents of your drive and creating a structure that resembles the source media. Mac allows creation of disk images through ‘Disk Utility’ or with the help of a command-line utility ‘hdiutil’. The image files created by Mac Disk Utility have the extension ‘.dmg’.

These files act as a backup of your disk and can be used to restore data in the event of a system crash or physical disk damage. But in certain perilous situations, the ‘dmg’ files might fail to mount. This would render all your precious backed up data completely inaccessible. In order to overcome this problem, you can opt for a professional Mac Data Recovery tool.

Let’s consider a real time scenario. Suppose, you try to upgrade your Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger to OS X 10.5 Leopard. After this, you thought of performing a complete re-installation of Leopard and making a full disk image before erasing data from the disk. To create the disk image, you used Disk Utility. Now, when you attempt to mount the backup image, you receive the following error on your screen:

“no mountable file systems”

Additionally, if you try to repair your ‘dmg’ file through Disk Utility, you end up with no useful results.

Cause:

This issue generally occurs when the operating system encounters problems with the underlying file system. This may happen due to corruption of the file system or missing file system components that are required for mounting the image file.

The problem will make your backup unusable and consequently, you may lose all your sensitive and critical information stored on the hard drive.

To effectively work around the issue, you should take help of professional Mac data recovery software. These tools are capable of dealing with almost all cases of data loss on a Mac hard drive, including file system corruption, deletion, formatting of partitions, etc. Besides performing data recovery, they give you an advanced utility ‘Boot DVD’ that helps you boot the system and access crucial data in case of a system crash.

Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery is a comprehensive tool that efficiently recovers data from HFS, HFS+, HFS Wrapper and FAT file system based volumes. In addition, it is compatible with the latest Mac OS X 10.7 ‘Lion’.

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Recovery Software: Recover Your Important Data Even after Formatting of Hard Drive

Posted on January 23, 2012 by admin

Mac data recovery is one of the most technical and complex activities because it is directly associated with hard disk drive. Not only non-technical people, data recovery is sometimes so complicated that it can irritate even an IT professional. But, the technique of data recovery through third-party software has made this task easier for everyone.

Losing important data from your computer is always unfortunate no matter the reasons of loss is accidental or a mistake. Keeping this thing in mind, Apple has developed Mac in such a way that it can handle most of such cases itself. But still, Mac operating system is prone to issues such as bad sector on hard disk, file system corruption, operating system corruption etc. and the common reason that leads to data loss situations is corruption of file system.

When you try to move some files to a folder on your Mac hard drive and you receive the following error message:

“The operation could not be completed. An unexpected error occurred (error code 1).”

 Cause:

The above error message appears if the file system of the drive, on which you are trying to move the data, is corrupt. However, a file system may become corrupted due to any of the following reasons:

  • Power outages or other power-related problems
  • Improper system shutdowns
  • Hardware failures
  • Bad sectors on hard drive

Any of the above given causes can result in file system corruption and a corrupted file system can cause data loss situations.

Solution:

In order to avoid such situations, you can follow the below given measures:

  • Always keep a power backup source to avoid issues due to power outages or power fluctuations.
  • Always shutdown the system properly and avoid switching off the system directly or when OS is saving data to the hard disk drive.
  • Run the in-built Disk Utility regularly to check for bad sectors on the hard drive.

After following the above given measures, it is possible that you can face the same issue again and sometimes it is required to format the hard drive or volume to resolve such issues. Formatting the hard drive or volume will remove all data from that volume. In such cases, you can use Mac data recovery software to Recover Formatted Drive

Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery allows you to recover data from almost all file systems including HFS, HFS+, FAT and HFS Wrapper. Moreover, this software can help you to recover data from all external storage media like iPod, memory card, USB flash drives etc.

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Data Recovery Utilities to Recover Lost Data in Mac

Posted on January 13, 2012 by admin

It has been a long time since the first Mac was introduced by Steve Jobs, the ex-chairman of Apple. Replacing the old command-line interface, Mac brought in graphical user interface and mouse to the personal computer. For its user-friendliness and advanced features, professionally Mac is considered as the most successful personal computer. Over the years, the it has many advancements and thus has a remarkable number of fan following. The Mac   became so popular among its users that many even start believing that it can never go wrong. But, unfortunately many users encounter instances of data loss in their Mac and look for Mac data recovery utilities.

While designing Mac, Apple has always given priority to two things. One is the new features and the other is the easiness to use those advanced features. With these two basic principles, the present days’ Mac has been developed to be good at everything that a user does everyday. However, no system can be entirely flawless and the same is applicable to the Mac as well.

At times, either due to user mistakes or due to existing bugs in the system, instances of data loss do occur. In day to day computer usage, a Mac user encounters many such instances of data loss or inaccessibility, some of which are listed as below:

  • Accidental deletion of files or folders containing important data
  • Accidental formatting of the hard drive or volumes
  • Corruption to the file system
  • Operating system malfunction
  • Deletion or loss of data because of virus or malware attack
  • Software or hardware contradiction, resulting in the loss/inaccessibility of data etc.

Among all these instances of data loss, the soothing fact is that the data that is being deleted or lost from the hard drive as a result of the above events is not actually completely erased. When data is deleted or formatted from the storage media, the Mac operating system declares the memory allocated to that data as free and the data can not be located at its source location, any further. But all those lost or inaccessible data remains present at its original memory location and can be recovered, using any Mac recovery software.

These data recovery Mac utilities are developed with many innovative techniques and are capable of recovering the data, under almost any instance of data loss or inaccessibility. Moreover, these software are completely risk-free and easy to use, even for the new non-technical Mac users.

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