My passport 500GB - Disk Utility 'keys out of order' 'disk needs to be repaired'

Hi there,

My, barely a few months old, WD my passport 500GB is causing me concern!

Up until yesterday, it was working just fine - I use it on my macbook os x 10.5.8, primarily for storing audio files from Logic Pro 9. 

Last night one of the regular backups failed. Ever since, it (mostly) does not appear in Finder (‘mostly’, because a couple of times, out of the many attempts over the course of today … it has appeared. Briefly!).

Disk Utility, recognizes it (though not every time.) yet, most options e.g. ‘Repair Disk permissions’ are grayed out … apart from ‘Verify Disk’ - which states (after, ‘Checking Extended Attributes file’ being last in the list of black writing.) 

‘keys out of order’

‘The volume my passport needs to be repaired’

‘Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.’ (all in red.)

… phew!

Can anyone suggest anything to help?

I really need to not lose the contents of this HD!

A couple of people, on similar thread forums, recommend ‘DiskWarrior’ … does this work? Someone posted that it didn’t, so I don’t really want to fork out for something that won’t change a thing.

Others have mentioned getting a ‘Y cable’ (?), something about it needing more boost?

Any help would be much appreciated!

cheers.

Hi there, I don’t think a “Y” booster cable is going to help because the drive is on Disk Utility, so the drive has enough power.

Disk Warrior is one of the many tools you can try for data recovery but is not free, so it’s a risk because is not a safe bet (Sometimes the data CAN’T be recovered with software, no matter how good it is). You can also use TestDisk, which is free to use and works with Macs and Windows, but will NOT help you if your drive is formatted as HFS+ (It can recover files from FAT32, which is a file system that works on Macs as well).

Other data recovery softwares you can use on Mac are Disk Drill, VirtualLab and Data Rescue 3 but none of them are free… Honestly, I don’t know of a free data recovery software for the HFS+ file system.

They are all powerful, but depending on the overall damage, then they may or may not recover the data. I think you’ll have better results with a recovery technician or specialist.

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You can try   MiniTool Mac Data Recovery