Disk repair
ITS can help recover data from damaged removable disks. We cannot provide any guarantees that data will be recovered.
If you wish to make a request for data recovery from a damaged or malfunctioning disk, please provide the ITS Service Desk with:
- Your original, malfunctioning disk (see below for further requirements).
- A replacement disk which we can use to store any recovered data; this disk must either be blank or must have enough free space to store the entire contents of your original disk (a blank CD-R disk is acceptable)
- Contact information on the disk recovery form (at the ITS Service Desk).
The service generally requires a turnaround time of at least one day. If the service takes more or less time than that, our goal is to keep you up-to-date along the way -- and that is why we will want your contact information.
At this time, we can only recover disks that have been formatted as Macintosh disks. This means they must be in "Mac OS Standard" (HFS) or "Mac OS Extended" (HFS+) format; we cannot recover Macintosh data from disks that are formatted for Microsoft Windows computers (FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS). (In many cases, we have found that people do not reformat their disks which have come preformatted for Windows use at the factory.)
We accept the following types of media:
- Iomega Zip disks: 100 MB.
We conditionally accept the following types of media on a case-by-case basis, and have a reduced chance of data recovery. We cannot repair disk or recover data from non-HFS+ formatted disks that were used primarily on a Macintosh computer. We have a reduced recovery rate for these types of disks.
- Internal Macintosh hard disks, when present in their original desktop or laptop computer (may require longer turnaround time)
- FileVault home directories (only with a known password; we cannot assist with forgotten user or FileVault master passwords) on an existing disk
- FireWire and/or USB external hard disks
- USB flash drives.
We do not accept the following media, either because we have a very low recovery rate or do not have the capacity to read them:
- Floppy 3.5-inch disks: 800 kB and 1.44 MB
- Iomega Zip disks: 250 MB and 750 MB
- SyQuest 3.5-inch Winchester cartridges: all capacities
- SyQuest 5.25-inch Winchester cartridges: 44, 88, and 200 MB
- Magneto-optical (MO) 3.5-inch disks: 128, 230, 640 MB, and 1.3 GB ("GigaMO")
- External Serial ATA (SATA) drives.
Even if the ITS Service Desk accepts your disk or drive, that does not guarantee that we can process it for recovery.
