External Hard Drive Issues....I think I have tried everything

I'd say it's time to cut your losses and either wipe it entirely and start over or, if that's not possible, buy a new drive.

bimmeracer said:

Any other suggestions?

Thanks

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Its toast. Just bite the bullet and repartition / format the drive.
You do have backups, right?

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miles01110 said:

I'd say it's time to cut your losses and either wipe it entirely and start over or, if that's not possible, buy a new drive.

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You cant "f00bar" disk permanently in "sofware level". I see no reason why erase/repartition/format woudnt work.

"If nothing works, I will just have to format the drive and start over. "

If you have current CCC backups, doing this would be the easiest route, by far.

Boot up from your backup drive, then...
Just re-initialize and re-partition the drive, then...
Just "re-clone" your respective partitions to the original drive.

The only disadvantage will be that it takes time to do the copying...

If you don't mind spending $99.95, try DiskWarrior. If DW doesn't repair it, nothing will.

"i also tried Data Rescue and it was also unable to fix or recover anything from the hard drive.
Any other suggestions?"

Yes.

You could try this:
1. Use Disk Utility to RE-INITIALIZE the drive into a SINGLE partition.
2. Do not, repeat DO NOT, choose the option to "zero data". You ONLY want to replace the directory with a "clean" one, you DO NOT want to "touch" any data on the drive's sectors.
3. Now, view the [apparently] "empty" volume using Data Rescue.
4. Have DR do a "deep search" of the entire drive -- this will take time. It might help to "limit" DR's search to certain file types (example: jpeg) that you may be trying to recover.
5. If DR finds data that you are looking for, you will need ANOTHER "scratch drive" to which DR can reconstruct and save the data files.

Why this may work:
Your drive probably had a completely corrupted directory and/or partition map. However, the actual -data- on the drive's platters may still be there, unharmed.

Remember that re-initializing a drive "wipes clean" the drive's directory ONLY. Data that is actually on the platters is left untouched, only the references to where that data are get replaced during the re-initialization process. Thus, although the drive may mount and show as "empty space" on the desktop, the data is "still there", waiting to be over-written.

Data Rescue (and other file recovery apps) is designed to "work around" the directory. That is, DR "goes right to the platters", and scavenges every sector. If it finds data there, it attempts to re-assemble the data files on its own, without help from the directory. Thus, it can recover files from the drive, even though when you mount the newly-initialized drive on the desktop, it says there's nothing on it.

I used this procedure to recover many gigabytes of mp3's from a drive partition that had become corrupted and un-mountable. Data Rescue couldn't "get to" the bad partition, because it -was- "un-mountable" and could not be "put on the desktop". By re-initializing the drive into a single partition, I was able to mount it, and I set up DR to search for mp3 files, and got nearly all the data back!

I am having the same problem with my hard drive. I accidentally unplugged my Lacie HD out of my mac without unmounting it, and it started having that problem. I have done that many times accidentally but I guess this is the first time it decided to crap out on me.

So, looking at "Fishrrman's" post. How exactly would you re-initialize the single into a single partition without the option to zero data? I do not see anything option or anything within Disk Utility.

If anyone could help me figure out that procedure, that would be great!

PS - My HD was formatted for NTFS and used with mac w/ paragon NTFS

any suggestions or help regarding this issue?