Mac Drive Stopped Working

ianjamie7

I have a mate whose Mac Drive has decided to stop working and he has lost some very important files. Is there any way he can recover those files. These are the only details I have got so any questions I Wong be able to answer straight away.
Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thank You

macman

'Stopped working' does not realy tell us anythng. What happens when he tries to boot up? What error mesages? Remove the drive and place in a USB caddy, If the drive simply has a corrupt OS then that may recover the data once connected to another computer. If the drive has physically failed, it won't, and forensic recovery is the only option-that will cost £300 upwards.
Did your mate not keep a back up of his 'very important files' though?

fwor

Note also that if he puts it in a caddy and connects it to a PC, he won't any built-in way to recover files, as Windows does not have native support for the Mac's filesystem - HFS+

So he would either need one of the Windows-based HFS utilities, or perhaps easier, to boot the PC from a Linux LiveCD, as most distros have HFS support built into the kernel.

Im_just_careful

I've never had this problem (fortunately) but I have added drives to a (much older) Mac (10.3).

I suggest fitting a new drive then once the machine is up and running again putting the drive in a caddy and see if the drive can be read. I would expect it to pop up on the desktop.