I run on a PPC G4 laptop, using OS 10.4.11; drive has worked wonderfully until this week. I received a notice that the drive was improperly removed (I didn’t unplug it). I had it plugged into a powered USB hub. I ran DiskUtility and repaired the disk. After it disconnected itself a second time, I plugged it back in and now it is unrecognizable.
When I ran R-Studio for Mac, every sector reported a read error before I aborted the scan. I tried a new USB cable, and that didn’t help. I suspect that something went wrong with the USB connection, but I can’t put the drive into another case, to retrieve the data.
HELP!!!
I can’t afford to pay for recovery (I’m unemployed and will be losing my benefits at the end of the year).
I have over 700 GB of data that I can’t get at. Any suggestions?
Have Yyou used disk utility? That sometimes works. If the drive was removed improperly, sometimes a header gets removed or screwed up. Run Disk first aid in the utilities folder.
I ran Disk Utility to verify and repair the disk after the first unexpected disconnect. After the second disconnect, Disk Utility just sees it as an unformatted drive - I can’t verify or repair it.
Hi - I sympathise with your problem…I’ve recently had a WD external hard drive that’s packed up. Most people think of their external hard drive as a backup drive. But it’s not a backup if it’s the only copy of your valuable data that you have. I think it’s imperative to have 2 hard drives (at least) to back each other up. If one fails, buy another one asap to maintain your two copies. The cost of a 2nd hard drive is minimal compared to the hassle you’ll have if your single drive is not accessible and you have to pay for the data to be recovered, if that’s even possible.
This wasn’t supposed to be a ‘back up’ drive, just a portable that I brought with when using my laptop. I didn’t have time to get data off before it totally failed (within an hour after I repaired the drive after the first unexpected disconnect).
I spoke with the tech support for the recovery software I tried (R-Studio for Mac); they say that the results I got indicate that the drive was not transmitting any data to the software, as all of the sectors from 0 to 2047 (when I aborted the image creation) reported as ‘bad’ – the software couldn’t read them after two tries.
This drive is a little over two years old – I have other portables that I have used for over 5 years without any problems, but those were laptop drives that I put into external enclosures myself, so I wasn’t expecting to have problems with this drive so soon.
I have learned my lesson and won’t buy another WD drive. Now I have to figure out how to get the data out of the drive when I can’t simply put it into a different case.
