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Disk Utility can't repair external hard drive

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graceannli

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 19, 2012
2
0
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!!
 
K

KPOM

macrumors P6
Oct 23, 2010
18,026
7,868
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.
 
G

graceannli

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 19, 2012
2
0
Thank you... but how can i copy it to the other drive without erasing all the data in that drive? Is it possible?
 
oneMadRssn

oneMadRssn

macrumors 603
Sep 8, 2011
5,977
13,990
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
 
K

KPOM

macrumors P6
Oct 23, 2010
18,026
7,868
graceannli said:
Thank you... but how can i copy it to the other drive without erasing all the data in that drive? Is it possible?
Click to expand...

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.
 
J

junkutt

macrumors newbie
Mar 21, 2012
1
0
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!
 
S

shanky34567

macrumors newbie
Jan 16, 2013
1
0
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
 
A

AniMac1114

macrumors newbie
Mar 22, 2013
2
0
me too!

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.
 
N

Nelsong

macrumors newbie
Aug 1, 2013
1
0
If you stop using the drive it's possible to recover deleted files that have not been overwritten by using data recovery software such as Data Rescue II, File Salvage or TechTool Pro. Each of the preceding come on bootable CDs to enable usage without risk of writing more data to the hard drive. Two free alternatives are Disk Drill and TestDisk. Look for them and demos at MacUpdate or CNET Downloads. Recovery software usually provide trial versions that enable you to determine if the software would help before actually paying for it. Beyond this or if the drive has completely failed, then you would need to send the drive to a recovery service, such as Data Recovery by DriveSavers, which is very expensive.

The longer the hard drive remains in use and data are written to it, the greater the risk your deleted files will be overwritten.
 
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