I had a few problems with my WD MyBook drive not been recognised every now and again on my Mac. Luckily, last Saturday it did pick it up, and I started to copy the drive contents over onto yet another back-up drive. In the middle of this process, my kid tripped yanked out the power cable. Now, when i reconnect it to my Mac, I get a message saying that the drive format is not recognised, and that the Mac want to reformat it.
Naturally, I don’t want to do this as it will wipe all the data on there - a few years of backed-up work.
Does anyone have any thoughts as to how I may be able to get it working again?
My only recommendation would be to transfer the data to a pc and then format it or, is the drive is formatted NTFS, you can download NFTS - 3gto run the drive on a mac without formatting it.-
According to the issue that you are currently experiencing, it could be data corruption. The data corruption on the drive happens, when the external hard drive is disconnected improperly or when the computer freeze while the drive is connected.
You may have a corrupt partition that Disk Utility can repair. Please see the link below for more information.
There is probably some corruption. A program like TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk or something similar for Mac I’m don’t know about Mac. You may just need to repair the partition data.
in addition to what everyone else is saying, I’d look for some kind of partition recovery software. if the files themselves are corrupted, you won’t be able to recover them, but I’ve seen people get a lot of their files back doing partition recovery. TestDisk might work, but like Joe says, it might not be Mac compatible.
I am currently facing this same issue. When the disk utility comes up to recover the WD external hard drive, it won’t let me select the partition option. All of the buttons that you would select to recover the hard drive are grayed out. The external hard drive is unrecognizable on my mac computer. I am currently running Mac OS 10.4.11 on my system so I know that it is compatible. I have used it before without any problems and I have about 2 years worth of files saved on it already. Granted I have not backed up any files for about 2 years now and I purchased my WD external hard drive about 4 years ago. I need to back up over 2,500 photos and videos. Please help advise me in the right direction so I can recover my current files that I have on my external hard drive and so I am able to back up my life from the last 2 years. Any advice would greatly be appreciated.
then take your drive to data recovery. if anyone can retrieve them, a data recovery company should be able to. that is if they are retrievable. however, having over 25 hundred photos and never having backed them up is well pretty dumb. a four year old drive is old by any standard. what were you thinking?
