Before you upgrade to Leopard®—
Apple® OS 10.5
We have had a number of clients visit us with hard drive problems that occurred during the process of upgrading to the Leopard® OS. We thought it would be helpful to share some of our observations for the benefit of clients who are contemplating the upgrade:
1. Target Hard Drives must be in Good Operating Condition
There is a potential conflict with the way that Leopard checksums data and the methods that some (failing) hard drives keep track of LBAs and manage bad blocks.
Bottom Line: a target hard drive must be in good operating condition. If it is failing or has an excessive number of bad blocks, Leopard may crash during installation, scrambling the directory and losing data. Currently, few disk repair tools have yet been upgraded to fix major directory problems with 10.5, which leaves data recovery as one of the few options available.
Many hard drives that appear to be OK have underlying problems that are invisible to users, especially laptop drives.
We recommend that all prospective upgraders check their hard drives for bad blocks and other problems with third-party tools that do sector-by-sector scans, such as Tech Tools Pro® and Drive Genius®.
Futhermore, we recommend that any marginal hard drives be replace proactively, and that all drives should be backed up before upgrading. I tell our clients that back up drives are cheap, whereas data recovery is not!
Also, we suggest that you use Alsoft's DiskWarrior® to optimize the directory and do a file permissions repair before upgrading.
2. Be Aware of a Bug in Leopard that can Result in Data Loss when
Transferring Data
Please visit this link for more information:
http://tomkarpik.com/articles/massive-data-loss-bug-in-leopard/
We understand that Apple is correcting this problem in an OS software update.
3. Know the Right Way to do an Archive Installation/Upgrade
We have had a number of clients who have inadvertently lost their user data and settings by failing to select the archive & install function during the installation of Leopard. Do not choose "Continue" at the screen that displays the target device— instead click on the "Options" button and select "Archive Installation" to preserve user programs and settings.
What Data Savers, LLC is Doing to Help
We offer a special discounted rate for data recovery if it just involves retrieving erased or missing data (assuming that the underlying hard drive is OK), as might apply when a system upgrade fails.
The discounted rate is $199, compared to our regular "Level A" recovery price of $349. However, some conditions and caveats go along with the special offer:
- It assumes that the hard drive will be left inside of the computer during the process.
- It also assumes that the hard drive does not have bad sectors or other defects.
- If the directory is severely damaged, we may be only able to recover files by generic type, without the original directory structure. The fee that we charge for this process is for the effort extended, and not just for the data recovered.
- If it turns out that the drive is damaged and must be removed for data recovery, then our regular recovery rates will apply.