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External Disk unrecognizer after pulloff witohut ejection

M

Marko Zorec

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 24, 2016
38
2
I have puloff by accident my important WD Elements Hard disk, and after that it is not recognized in finder, but the disk is working, because the light is on and also the sound...

In Disk Utility - I have the image here, what is like:

Screen Shot 2018-09-11 at 15.22.02.png


Please - if you have any solution on this, I need my files very very urgent...

Thank you...
 
It happen nothing if I click Mount... Uh, I am very very concerned, should I take it to the professionals? I am willing to pay any amount to save my data....:(

I always click eject first, it was by accident - move...
[doublepost=1536680664][/doublepost]Will i be able to bring me back data? :(
 
Marko Zorec said:
It happen nothing if I click Mount... Uh, I am very very concerned, should I take it to the professionals? I am willing to pay any amount to save my data....:(

I always click eject first, it was by accident - move...
[doublepost=1536680664][/doublepost]Will i be able to bring me back data? :(
Click to expand...

Reboot your computer. Let it sit for a few mins after a fresh reboot. Then plug in your drive and see if it does same thing. Click Mount. Let it sit for 10 mins. Let us know what happens after this.

In the future, if you have irreplaceable data, have it in multiple locations. (Multiple backup drives and in a different location if you can just in case of fire, theft, etc...).
 
Marko Zorec said:
It did not happen anything...i waited 10 minutes.......:(
Click to expand...

That sucks. That's not a good sign. :( Really rare to crash a drive for just ejecting it. I do it all the time with drives I don't care about. In all my years I've only had 1-2 drives crash specifically because of that.

My guess is, depending on the value of the data on the drive, that you could probably get a data recovery, though I hear those are very expensive (in the thousands of dollars).

Have you tried First Aid on the drive? If not, try that, then mount.
 
Marko Zorec said:
It happen nothing if I click Mount... Uh, I am very very concerned, should I take it to the professionals? I am willing to pay any amount to save my data....:(

I always click eject first, it was by accident - move...
[doublepost=1536680664][/doublepost]Will i be able to bring me back data? :(
Click to expand...
If the data is truly that important, I'd recommend purchasing a utility like Disk Drill.

I did it at a pinch at work (user lost 500GB of commercial footage while I was on vacation). I wasn't around to do the usual data recovery stuff (which is too complicated to lay out in a post) so I purchased this and handed it over to the user. It did a fantastic job of recovering nearly everything at which point I dragged the data to a different drive, reformatted the corrupted one, and copied the data back on.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/disk-drill-media-recovery/id431224317?mt=12

For $40 and the ease of use, I'd say it was worth it, especially easy to use for the not-too-technically-inclined.
 
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This problem happened to me a couple of times as well. I never figured out the exact solution.

Rebooting with the external hdd attached and without attached sometimes helped. Sometimes after at least half an hour of using the MacBook with the drive attached. As mentioned before.

One time connecting it to my colleague his Macbook worked. Hopefully you will unlock the drive again.
 
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I hope ... Should I give it a try with Disk-drill-recovery or take the disk to profesionals....:? I have really bad feeling.....
 
Reboot your Mac without the drive plugged in, but hold OPT+CMD+P+R keys when you hear the chime but before the Apple logo appears. Keep holding it till the computer reboots again, and repeat 2-3 times. Then boot normal, plug the drive in.

This is an NVRAM\PRAM reset sequence and forces the OS to start fresh with all external devices.

By improperly ejecting, the OS can get into a state where it thinks it is connected, but it is not. I suspect if you ran the "diskutil list" command in terminal, the drive will appear in the list.
 
Thanx but I made NVRAM reset several times and nothing has changed......:(
[doublepost=1536698601][/doublepost]
Screen Shot 2018-09-11 at 22.42.17.png

[doublepost=1536698661][/doublepost]Screenshot of my terminal diskutil list-....

external disk is the last one - 1 TB...
 
disk2s2 showing is a good sign. Maybe DiskWarrior/TechTool Pro can help here? Testdisk if you feel brave.
 
Marko Zorec said:
I hope ... Should I give it a try with Disk-drill-recovery or take the disk to profesionals....:? I have really bad feeling.....
Click to expand...
Disk Drill won’t harm anything, and it’s $40. It’s been a few years but when I used to work at Best Buy their 3rd party data recovery STARTED at $250 and I remember a pretty irate lady who was furious that the *quote* came out to $700.

Now, seeing as the drive clearly shows up on your machine it’s highly likely this is just a corrupt partition scheme. If you don’t have the chops for something like testdisk, I’d strongly recommend something like Disk Drill. I don’t mean to push this particular product, it’s just the one I’ve used in the last two weeks so I can vouch for it. Download the free trial and if that starts getting results you know that buying the full license will be the cheapest way to get your data back.
 
Ok, so OS thinks it is already mounted, use:

diskutil unmount /dev/disk2s2

This will force it to unmount. Then wait 10 seconds, turn around three times, put your left hand in and plug the USB drive back in, it should auto mount and do the Hokey Pokey for you.
 
OK; thanx to all... Anyway, why is the name showing disk2s2 a good sign?

OK, I will try that software today...

Testwarrior, diskutil unmount /dev/disk2s2 sounds like good idea, but as yousee, system thinks it is already unmounted:

Screen Shot 2018-09-12 at 06.30.06.png

[doublepost=1536727476][/doublepost]I installed free version Disk Drill, the disk has showe d up, I click recovery, and here is what is happening, it looks like it is searchng the disk:

Screen Shot 2018-09-12 at 06.42.10.png

[doublepost=1536728283][/doublepost]I mean - is it good sign? Will it works? To buy sofyware or what is the way to get these files?
 
Last edited:
What happens if you try the mount (replace unmount with mount) command? I'd think DiskWarrior is the best bet for this job. I don't know if they have a free trial. Also, try "sudo fsck disk2s2" in terminal and see what happens. I got a feeling the B Tree is corrupt.
 
OP wrote:
"I am very very concerned, should I take it to the professionals? I am willing to pay any amount to save my data..."

Are you willing to pay...
$1,000 ?
$1,500 ?
even
$2,000 ?
 
OK, my good friend works as professional - his job is saving disks data...

He said today, when diagnose the disk:

reading heads are OK, damages are on SA Service area, and Catalog file is somewhat damaged. He need to make image of disk, reconstruct catalog file...bottom line - most of the data is possible to bring back, he need 2 or 3 days....

So - I have luck to have that friend, probably....:)
 
"So - I have luck to have that friend, probably...."

Friends like that are GOOD to have around...!

In the future, I suggest you do this:
1. Get a second drive
2. Get either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper
3. Use either of these to "make a clone" of the drive (an exact copy).
4. Now if the one fails, you still have the backup.
 
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