3rd External Hard Drive failure

[nateo200]

I have a Western Digital Elements external 1TB hard drive. This thing ***** out on me way too much, first time I pulled the cord without ejecting and one partition became unwritable but still readable. Now some kid next to me thought it would be funny to pull the cord in the out of my hard drive in the middle of me encoding a multi day video project in compressor. The ProRes 30gig file was on my external and I was writing to my macs interal hard drive in H.264. Now I get a message saying the disc is unreadable with not even the option to try and repair the disk. I'm really frustrated because this project is the one video thing that I only backed up once versus my usual 2 or 3 places.

I have screenshots below...If I can't recover this stuff on my mac can I pay someone to recover whats left? I'm really frustrated now, not over my almost complete DVD collection seemingly lost but all the hard work that I had on the drive I know this might be off topic for this section but I figured you guys in this section would understand how frustrating data loss is...

 

[nateo200]

No one?

 

[hsilver]

Often, the failure when a drive is improperly ejected is in the bridge circuit in the enclosure. If you put it in another enclosure, it may work. Disk Warrior sometimes can fix the drive. Does it have a USB port? I assume you were using FW. Try hooking it up via USB.

 

[WRP]

If I can't recover this stuff on my mac can I pay someone to recover whats left?

No but you can have the douchebag next to you pay to have it recovered.

A client of mine dumped a 1 TB drive off his desk while it was writing. Went to get up and his foot caught the cable. Had important stuff on it so he sent it to drivesavers. $5000 later they got MOST of the data off. Luckily for me some of the stuff that didn't get recovered were my project files so they had to pay me to do it again

There are cheap utilities you can try first before doing this route though.

 

[TimO-Florida]

Had important stuff on it so he sent it to drivesavers. $5000 later they got MOST of the data off.

A reason I'm very partial to Glyph drives; they will pay for basic drive recovery for the first two years of the warranty.

The 160gb one on my PC studio has run for 5 years without a problem and I just got a 1tb model (usb, fw400, fw800, eSata) with my iMac for only $50 more than I would have paid for a basic usb WD Elements drive.

 

[WRP]

A reason I'm very partial to Glyph drives; they will pay for basic drive recovery for the first two years of the warranty.

Dropping a drive while it is writing 3 feet to the ground doesn't require "basic recovery".

 

[LethalWolfe]

First off, it's not the disk's fault that people keep screwing with it. If a process, even in the background, is still writing to the disk and that process gets cut off because the disk isn't ejected properly bad things happen.

Second, give Disk Warrior a shot. I've had it repair boot drives that multiple Macs would not see.


Lethal

 

[thekev]

First off, it's not the disk's fault that people keep screwing with it. If a process, even in the background, is still writing to the disk and that process gets cut off because the disk isn't ejected properly bad things happen.

Second, give Disk Warrior a shot. I've had it repair boot drives that multiple Macs would not see.


Lethal

That could work. The one thing you have going here is that it's showing up. If it wasn't showing up or spinning up, your options are much more limited. Well if it wasn't showing up I'd say pull it out of the case, but if it still didn't show up, then your options start to dwindle.

 

[arjen92]

I'm not that familiar with hard drives that I can save GUID partition tables and stuff, but when my hard drive went bad (something with the EFI files being too small?) I couldn't see it on my mac.

I used DataRescue to get the files of my drive. It was one TB on a 3 TB hard drive, so it took a few days. But now I've got all my files back. So you could give it a try.

 

[foobarbaz]

Technically this is a corrupted file system, not a hard drive failure.

What file system was on the disks?

If you're capable on the command line, PhotoRec is a free way to recover a bunch of files.

 

[nateo200]

No but you can have the douchebag next to you pay to have it recovered.

A client of mine dumped a 1 TB drive off his desk while it was writing. Went to get up and his foot caught the cable. Had important stuff on it so he sent it to drivesavers. $5000 later they got MOST of the data off. Luckily for me some of the stuff that didn't get recovered were my project files so they had to pay me to do it again

There are cheap utilities you can try first before doing this route though.

I am seriously considering it. I already made the kid buy me lunch lol. I rarely carried the drive around and the one day he ****ed it up

First off, it's not the disk's fault that people keep screwing with it. If a process, even in the background, is still writing to the disk and that process gets cut off because the disk isn't ejected properly bad things happen.

Second, give Disk Warrior a shot. I've had it repair boot drives that multiple Macs would not see.


Lethal

Ill give that a try! Thanks! The drive was being read idk if that makes a difference.....the drive being written to was my boot drive in my Mac.

Technically this is a corrupted file system, not a hard drive failure.

What file system was on the disks?

If you're capable on the command line, PhotoRec is a free way to recover a bunch of files.

It was an NTFS drive with a exFAT partition in a small partition for windows compatibility (though no OS).