External Hard drive issue on Mac Book Air

[nates0819]

hello everyone! I'm sorry if this is in the wrong section but i wasn't sure where to put it. SO i have a macbook air and an external hard drive (1tb) formatted for mac. It worked perfectly my entire deployment. Its almost full with movies, music and all of my pictures and videos from afghanistan. The only thing i really care about is the pictures. Whenever i try to open the HD it freezes my computer. I've tried doing the repair feature with my macbook but it loads and loads and then freezes. i have another hard drive i could use to transfer the pictures if i could just get into the HD. any advice? any info is greatly appreciated. thanks in advance!

 

[Ray2]

Hopefully others will chime in as well.

Bus powered or has its own power brick? If it has its own, does the disk spin (listen close) or make tick, tick sounds? If the latter, a new power supply.

Remove the hdd from one enclosure and install in the other. See if it works. If so, its either the power supply or the enclosure. If not, its time to do a data recovery. I use Data Rescue which is not cheap. The free tools I've seen allow one to find the files but pay-up to save them. My experience is its easy to recover the vast majority of the files as long as you don't keep writing to the drive.