Disk Utility can't repair external hard drive

[graceannli]

I am using the newest MacBook Air, Mac OS X 10.7.3.

My external drive is a Samsung M2 Portable 3 Media, 500GB.

I might have accidentally disconnected the hard drive without ejecting it first. Now when I run disk utility and click Repair Disk it says: "Disk utility can't repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore you backed-up files."

Buying disk repair software like DiskWarrior isn't an option for me. Is there anything else I can do to repair the hard drive or recover the data? I know that there is a 'restore disk' option, but it would erase everything in the destination drive. Is there any way to avoid this?

Please help!! I'm really freaking out. Thank you!!

[KPOM]

One solution is to copy the data to another drive and reformat it. Usually when you get this message, you can still read the drive and copy from it, but not write to it.

[graceannli]

Thank you... but how can i copy it to the other drive without erasing all the data in that drive? Is it possible?

[oneMadRssn]

I am not sure if it is related, but it seems Disk Utility is unable to do anything useful to USB drives in Lion. I haven't tried doing any repairs, but I have tried and failed many times to format a USB hard drive.

The solution I have found so far is terminal commands for diskutil do work just fine. Maybe try that?

See: http://ss64.com/osx/diskutil.html

[KPOM]

Originally Posted by graceannli

Thank you... but how can i copy it to the other drive without erasing all the data in that drive? Is it possible?

If there is enough free space on the other drive, you can just copy items over. For instance, if you have another external drive with enough free space, just plug them both in, and copy data from the drive that needs to be reformatted to the other one. Open up each drive in Finder, and just drag all the files and folders over.

[junkutt]

Just had this very same problem on a an external drive...
Except I couldn't even copy any file to my desktop or other external drives, so wouldn't have been able to do a back up.

I think it is FAT32 formatted, so I plugged it into an old Windows XP laptop I have and the drive was working fine on there (tested it by copying the same file as before onto the desktop)..
Then shutdown XP and plugged it back into my mac and everything is back to normal!

[shanky34567]

Hello,
You can try some reliable recovery tool which can help you out to recover your deleted data back from the external hard drive. When I was going through the same problem I tried HDD partition recovery software which helped me to restore all the data lost from my Western Digital external hard drive. Just you have to click here if you want to try the software.
All the best,
Shanky

[AniMac1114]

Hello,
I have a similar problem! I have a seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1.5tb external memory drive, partitioned to work with both mac and PC (1tb to 500gb), the mac part I used for time machine backups and the pc just stored files. Recently it stopped showing up on my Mac (and on other Macs as well) but still shows up fine on PCs (the PC part shows up only, as it should).

Tried Disk Utility repairs, says that it cannot be repaired or verified, and also tried mounting it in Disk Utility, says cannot be mounted.

The light on the external drive lights up and it hums as if it is working, but my computer doesn't see it. When trying to mount it , the name changes and becomes "disk1s1" or something similar.

PLEASE HELP! How do I make it show up on my MAC? Without loosing data.

I have MAC OS X Snow Leopard running btw on my Macbook.