Case notes · Mac & Apple · EDR-2025-2621
Slow to Mount, Unplugged Too Early.
A Seagate Backup Plus 2TB rode in an East Devon music teacher's bag between schools, holding eleven years of recorded lessons. Then a mount took the best part of ten minutes
, beachball spinning, so she pulled the lead, thinking the Mac had hung
. A few tries on, it stopped appearing anywhere at all
. No other copy existed.
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In plain English.
Ten minutes to mount is a disk narrating its own decline. Before a Mac can show a volume it must fetch the catalogue, and when those sectors sit on failing surface, each read becomes a string of retries the Finder can only wait out. The unkind twist is what feels natural next: plug it in again. Every fresh attempt sends the heads back across the weakest ground, and a patch that was merely slow on Monday can be unreadable by Friday.
The tools this job took.
See how your case runs →| System | The part it played | Why we rate it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Ran the copy on gentle settings once all mounting had been banned | Images by head map — timeouts, resets and power-cycling managed per head |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Brought the HFS+ volume up out of the image, catalogue whole | Handles the harder filesystems well — APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Placed the failing zone under the catalogue via firmware access | Talks to a drive through the maker's own commands, not just standard ATA |
On the bench.
The plugging-in stopped at the lab door
From arrival the Seagate never met another operating system; it spoke only to bench equipment. At firmware level the picture was plain: a growing band of failing sectors, centred on the region HFS+ reserves for its catalogue — precisely why mounting crawled, and why in the end nothing appeared at all.
The catalogue came first, and came slowly
The image ran in a set order: catalogue and metadata regions first, slowly and under tight retry limits — they are what turn raw sectors into pupils' names and dated folders — then the audio in bulk. Her tug on the cable, for the record, had harmed nothing.
Reassemble the volume from the image
Reconstruction happened on the completed copy, never on the drive — the difference between an archive still sorted by pupil and year, and a heap of numbered orphans. Names, folders and dates all came through with the recordings.
How it ended.
The archive went home in its proper folders; she spot-played lessons from several years before sign-off. Nine recordings from the worst stretch returned cut short, each named in the notes.
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