External Drive Not Readable

[EmJB]

Hi there

I've just tried to plug in my external hard drive to my mac (10.6) and it says that it's not readable. When I click on initialize it takes me to my disk utility but I can't repair disk permissions (it's greyed out).

Does anyone have any ideas what I need to do?!

Thanks

 

[chrisrand]

Hi there

I've just tried to plug in my external hard drive to my mac (10.6) and it says that it's not readable. When I click on initialize it takes me to my disk utility but I can't repair disk permissions (it's greyed out).

Does anyone have any ideas what I need to do?!

Thanks

Have you tried plugging it in to different USB ports? If so, then this is most likely a sign of drive failure, either mechanically (i.e. it was dropped), physically (bad sectors), or software (lost drive partition map)

Depending on your level of expertise and willingness to tinker, you can try using a program called TestDisk to see if the partition map can be recovered.

I'm sure there are better videos than this, but it will give you a general idea of what to do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_EwWNw2lso

 

[Fishrrman]

Can you hear the external drive "spin up" when you connect it?

Is there any way you could take the drive to ANOTHER computer (Mac or PC) and connect it there, to see if you get a similar message?

 

[Tumbleweed666]

And if none of that works, buy another drive and restore from your backup.