Data Recovery from an "unreadable" Drive

[YellowBeard]

I have a USB powered 1TB WD external HD with many important files on it, it used to work fine now when I plug it in I get the following message,

"The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer."

I am running a late 2011 MackBook Pro on OSX Lion 10.7.2
I do have my system backed up with time machine but some data that is older than the oldest date in the time machine backup was stored on this drive. (sorry about the wording there)

The LED on the front of the drive flashes as if it were working. When I open Disk Utility and select the drive the info at the bottom of the screen says:


Disk Description : WD Elements 1023 Media
Total Capacity : 2.2 TB (2,199,021,158,400 Bytes)
Connection Bus : USB
Write Status : Read Only
Connection Type : External
S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported
Partition Map Scheme : Unformatted

the strange thing is the drive is only a 1TB Drive, and it was definately formatted the last time I used this drive (in exFAT if memory serves me correctly, so as to maximise compatibility with other computers). It has only been used on this computer (ie no meddlsome windows machine).

All options for Verify Disk, Disk Repair, Verify Permissions and Permission Repair are greyed out and unavailable. even if I boot from the recovery partition and run disk utility from there the same thing happens.

my question after trawling around the net for days on end is this:

- Is there any way to regain formatting of this drive without losing the information?
- Is there a program that can salvage the information on the disk while the drive is "unreadable by this computer" ( I am Happy to buy a replacement drive if i can salvage the information from the dead one) - and if so what is it
- Is it possible to format the drive so it is readable then recover the data?

I am worried to try anything without finding out my options first as I dont want to lose all the data permanently. (and yes I am painfully aware of the fact that i should have backups of backed up backups but its a little too late ;'-(

thanks for your time

 

[davidoloan]

- Is there any way to regain formatting of this drive without losing the information?
- Is there a program that can salvage the information on the disk while the drive is "unreadable by this computer" ( I am Happy to buy a replacement drive if i can salvage the information from the dead one) - and if so what is it
- Is it possible to format the drive so it is readable then recover the data

http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm Maybe

http://media.grc.com/sr6_with_leo.zip
http://media.grc.com/sr6_on_techtv.zip

 

[YellowBeard]

thanks for your reply david, I tried running spinrite on windows 7 which i have running in VMware Fusion and could not actually get it to do anything all it wanted to do was create a bootable disk and wouldnt actuall start up or find the disk i am trying to fix… any other suggestions

cheers

 

[waw74]

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
?

 

[Rbenton]

Disk inserted not readable

I get this awkward "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer," with the options of IGNORE and EJECT. My problem is that this shows up when I turn on my printer (an HP Photosmart C4780). I am not inserting a disk, a hard drive, a thumb or flash drive or any other storage device. Everything works fine if I select either of the two options (ignore or eject). But I can't get the message to stop showing up and am curious as to why it shows up anyway.

Sorry this is a reply to a post rather than a new post but I can't figure out how to post something new.