I was asked to take a look at a MacBook that was only showing a folder with a question mark instead of booting up. I was hoping it would be an easy fix, but unfortunately, that was not the case. Apple actually has very good support documentation (http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1440), but unfortunately none of these steps worked for me. For anyone else in the same situation, I also recommend looking into the fsck and newfs commands, but these commands did not help me either, other than reporting the BAD SUPERBLOCK: MAGIC NUMBER WRONG error.
Good software deserves its recognition, and what I eventually had to do was use an awesome program: Data Rescue 3 (http://www.prosofteng.com/). Just some quick comments:
- installation was easy since the program is a “good Mac citizen” (only involves being dragged to the Applications folder)
- interface was intuitive and easy and pretty much only involved selecting the disk I wanted to recover and the different recovery methods
- I eventually had to use the “deep scan” method, which took a few hours (mentioned clearly in the interface), but afterwards all the recovered files were organized nicely by type (e.g. Music, Documents, etc.) and were restored with just a few clicks
In hindsight, using Data Rescue 3 was similar to the Mac experience. There was a premium to pay, but in the end, it just worked.
Christopher Baek 