----Synopsis----

A hard disk from a macintosh computer failed resulting in a white screen at boot time. The owners were told that the drive was damaged and it was replaced. The faulty drive was imaged, the hfsplus boot block was repaired using the alternate boot block and the filesystem was repaired, allowing for the recovery of all of the owners personal data.

----Imaging----

A computer running Ubuntu linux and GNU ddrescue was turned on and the 2.5 inch drive was connected using a SATA to USB cable and external power supply.

$tail -f /var/log/messages

The view of the /var/log/messages showed numerous read errors as the drive was being recognized. After several attempts at power cycling the drive, it was recognized in /proc/partitions as the correct devices (/dev/sdc /dev/sdc1 and /dev/sdc2). Imaging of /dev/sdc2 was started several times, but the drive failed. The imaging of /dev/sda was started and much more data was recovered in the first few hours.

$sudo ddrescue /dev/sdc image log

The drive