External Hard Drive Enclosure Help

[napolneon]

I recently bought my external hard drive enclosure the RetailPlus EU20 2.5" SATA HDD Portable Enclosure, after my hard drive on my macbook crashed. (Late 2008 aluminum 13" macbook). I brought it into the genius bar for repair, and they ended up giving me a new hard drive because my old one wasn't working. Now, after buying the enclosure and putting my old hard drive inside it, my computer doesn't recognize the hard drive enclosure at all. Not even on other computers (Toshiba satellite). The hard drive works in the enclosure, the light flashes and I hear it running, and I also hear the clicking noise that made me bring it into apple. I was just wondering if this would be a problem with the Enclosure itself, or if it's a hard drive problem (making all this effort a waste and all the files I had on my old hard drive lost). I really appreciate everyone's help! Thanks in advance for posting!

 

[Consultant]

Although a Mac can read both Mac and PC drives.

PC cannot read Mac drives unless you install something like MacDrive (do they still make that?)

But if you have a harddrive problem you should use a Mac based utility to try to see what you can get from the drive.

 

[napolneon]

oh okay, thank you. I thought i would be able to put the enclosure into any computer and get all my information off it.

i think that it's just my hard drive that's garbage.

 

[balamw]

If it doesn't mount on the Mac it probably is toast.

To prevent this for the future pick up a separate drive for your enclosure and use that for backups!

B

 

[napolneon]

i was afraid that that was the case. i bought a portable hard drive to back my computer up with. I definitely learned from my mistake of not backing my computer up. All my music, school notes, etc are lost.

But thanks for the help! I appreciate it!

 

[jekyl]

oh okay, thank you. I thought i would be able to put the enclosure into any computer and get all my information off it.

i think that it's just my hard drive that's garbage.

You COULD try installing that bare drive to SATA port INSIDE your pc and try running Spinrite on it and see if that can repair the drive. It will still not be READABLE on your pc when done but if SPINRITE works you would be able to move the drive back to the external enclosure and at the point the Macbook should be able to read it. The fact that it is a Mac formatted drive inside a PC would be irrelevant, Spinrite does not care about format as it only sees raw sectors.

jkl

 

[SplicedBanjo]

This seems pretty "cut and dry" to me. You already knew the drive was broken. You tried connecting it to your Mac, and it didn't work. What is surprising about that?

You certainly still have all the usual options for data recovery... but it seems like you thought moving the drive from internal to external would somehow fix it, which seems pretty unrealistic to me.

 

[napolneon]

i've contacted apple and they told me all i needed to do was to buy an external enclosure and i would be able to access and retrieve all the files that i had on my old hard drive. hence why i went through this entire process. if they had told me from the get go that i wouldn't be getting anything from the hard drive then i wouldn't have bothered :/

 

[-tWv-]

i've contacted apple and they told me all i needed to do was to buy an external enclosure and i would be able to access and retrieve all the files that i had on my old hard drive. hence why i went through this entire process. if they had told me from the get go that i wouldn't be getting anything from the hard drive then i wouldn't have bothered :/

I would consider using a utility that can recover information off of a hard drive like Data Rescue 3. This is obviously software you would have to purchase but would be worth it in the long run if you can get your data back and if you ever run into this problem again. Obviously this wouldn't work if the HDD is completely unreadable, but if it shows up in Disk Utility I believe it will work.

I have had success with Data Rescue when I accidentally reformatted an external hard drive that contained all of my movies. Even though I reformatted the drive, Data Rescue was still able to get back all of the movies I had lost. It took multiple hours but I got everything back that I needed and saved me a lot of time and money trying to replace the movies.

 

[Fishrrman]

"i was afraid that that was the case. i bought a portable hard drive to back my computer up with. I definitely learned from my mistake of not backing my computer up. All my music, school notes, etc are lost."

Important questions:
The "enclosure" you bought -- is it a "portable" enclosure that connects and gets its power via USB? With or without a power supply? (This can be a VERY important issue)

Be aware that the USB ports on many Macs (including laptops) have a slightly "lower power specification" than do those on PC's. Not sure why Apple does this, but it -is- true for some Macs.

What this means is that when you connect a USB drive to some Macs (and the drive is being connected WITHOUT an external power source), the Mac's USB port may not supply enough current to get the drive "up and running" and mounted on the desktop. In some cases, you may hear it "half-run" -- that is, spins up a little, then spins down, up, down, etc. This is happening because the drive can't get enough power.

The solutions are to use an external power source with the external drives. Sometimes a "powered" USB hub might help. Another solution is a "USB Y-cable" -- has -2- connectors at the Mac end, merging into a single connector at the drive end. This provides a little extra power and gets the drive going.

Having said that, there is another way (one much easier in my opinion).

That is, if you can spend $20 or so, get one of these:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=usb+sata+dock&x=0&y=0
(many items shown, they all work the same, just pick one you like that's cheap)

Put the bare drive into the dock, connect the dock, turn it on. If the drive still won't mount up, it's probably the drive.

You'll find that a USB/SATA dock is a -very- handy piece of equipment to have in your drawer, and did I mention that they were -cheap-?

 

[monokakata]

I'm with touchdownjesus4. Data Rescue 3 is free to experiment with. If it can recover anything, it'll tell you. Then you decide whether to pay for it or not.

You'll lose nothing except some time, and you might recover your data. I've done it, and I'm hardly alone in this.