Uh Oh... external drive wont boot up

I'll skip the lecture about backups because you probably already realize how necessary they are.

Is this your only drive? All your system files and personal stuff on it? Or is it a secondary drive?

Either way, don't use the Norton disk yet. That's your last resort.

If it's a secondary drive, can Disk Utility see it?

If it's your only drive, can you boot from your OS X CD?

Have you had your computer open for any reason? Any chance of a loose cable somewhere?

What kind of Mac is it?

If it's an external drive, what do you mean by "not able to boot up"?
Can you boot the Mac from it's main internal drive and can't MOUNT the external drive, or can you molunt the drive but cannot boot the Mac from it?

data recovery

pdrayton said:

Here are some extra basics:

Disk Utility tells me that the B-directory can't be read and can't fix it

Norton says it encountered serious problems and can't continue maybe try again, it won't quit and hence it hangs.

Any insight you have would be greatly appreciated!

Click to expand...

It sounds like you have a directory problem at least, or perhaps a physical problem with the drive. You should also make sure that drive has the latest firmware from the manufacturer, expecially if it's a Firewire 800 drive...but you might not want to do this until after you recover the data!

I highly recommend DiskWarrior as the first third-part utility to try. Another good utility for recovering data is Data Rescue. Also, make sure you have enough drive space on another drive to which you can copy any recovered data; you might want to go ahead and buy another firewire drive for that purpose (you can never have too many) 😉

If you're not confident about what you're doing, and the data is truly mission-critical (and you're willing to pay through the nose for it), you can call Drive Savers for a quote. They have as good a chance as anybody to recover the data, and they claim to be the only company Apple authorizes to do data recovery on drives under warranty (I know that doesn't apply in this case, but it does give them more validity).

Yeah, it sounds like it's time for Disk Warrior.

In cases like this I've sometimes had success making an image of the bad drive in Disk Utility. You can even do this on a disk that won't mount. The image will mount and you'll have access to at least some of your data. You need a ton of free space to do that though, which might mean buying a new drive. Disk Warrior is cheaper with (probably) the same results.

After you get your data back, think about how you've treated that external drive. Problems like this don't generally happen spontaneously. There are things you can do (and not do) to avoid this kind of thing in the future. Unplugging/turning off an external drive without unmounting it is probably the #1 cause. It won't kill it the first time, but eventually this exact thing happens.