mac pro / hard drive help

Somy friend asked me to repair his mac pro with os x capitan,saying that it does not boot. >boot the mac pro only gives a flashing folder icon with question mark >tried booting into the recovery partition using command + r ,got nothing >keep hearing the clicking noises >suspect it's the hard drive >tear down the mac pro and plug it using sata to usb on my windows laptop >still makes clicking noises without being detected is there anything else i can try ? he is pretty poor so i want to spare him the repair fees , i also hate posting tech support questions but i am really lost here, van any lainons help me out

If it's a hardware problem you can't do much. The best you can do is write zero on all the disk (type "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=4096" where sdx needs to point to your HDD). Then install another system. He should just buy another HDD or SSD. It's not that expensive.

Clicking noises? Most likely HDD's servo is dead. I hope your friend made backups. Anyway. Try ddrescue first. If HDD's servo isn't completely dead you just might salvage some data with ddrescue. By putting HDD into a bunch of plastic bags and freezing you might be able to salvage some more. Read the fuarrrking manuals. If the servo is dead you'll need a clean room and a second identical HDD. Or electron microscope. Btw, did you know that US army collects and sends for electron microscope analysis all HDD found in war zones if they weren't burned (platters stop being magnetic when heated)? In the worst case you can try to send your HDD to Syria. Maybe NSA will restore those precious files for you. Just do backups every fuarrrking day. Mkay?

off topic but my waifu, had a 2TB external hd on her macbook, and formatted thinking it was her SD card. Is there anything to undo the format and keep the file system as it was before? Or just PhotoRec the hell of it and let her sort everything manually for not being careful? It was 2TB exFAT formatted to 2TB exFAT with OSX diskutil, she used /dev/disk3/ but sadly SD was /dev/disk4/ Also I guess since the drive was 2TB and the mac only have a 256GB ssd drive, should I purchase another 2TB drive to copy everything that photorec manages to save?

>>608 Depends. PhotoRec is an option, but I would also consider making a copy of the disk and trying to recover using a hex editor and linux fuse exFAT driver under gdb. Disk reformated with the same FS most likely means its just new superblock and root directory, hardcoding that soykaf into fuse driver for one-time read-only thing should be fairly easy.

>>609 all right i'm digging into that

Thank's for the help fams, been really good to hear your suggestions

>>608 > Gparted Gparted offers a basic attempt data recovery program (Device>Attempt Data Recovery) > DDRescue This is what I used originally when I was in this boat. I had formatted I drive I wasn't supposed to. I used DDRescue to replace the partition flags, file system information, etc. All of data became accessible again. I have tried to look for an exact guide (because to hell if I remember how I did it) but cannot find one > Other options This Tom's Hardware post mentions some software: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/289478-32-undo-quick-format-hard-drive Best of luck. I wish I could remember exactly how I used DDRescue to detect and restore a partition. GParted I think will do an automated fix of this. If you do not have linux installed, you can put Mint on a flash drive real quick and just install gparted temporarily in the pre-install environment.