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External harddrive is making me homicidal.

M

Mattaria

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 3, 2011
8
0
New poster, vaugely followed the site for a while though. Apologies for the generic "i'm only here to ask for help" type post.

So basically, I own a 2011 mbp 15" and a 2007 macbook. I have several external harddrives that I use for backing up media and such. The problem being one of the harddrives seems to have completely stopped transferring data, it's under warranty and I can get it replaced no problem, and I have enough space on the others to house the content of said broken drive for the timebeing however this is where the drive not being able to transfer data becomes a bit of an issue.

this is the drive http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=260 when I connect it it takes hours(literally) to index and then spends hours preparing to transfer but doesn't actually start. Has ANYONE got any idea on how i can get it to work long enough to take 1.7 tb of data off of it without having to pay a data recovery company.

I've tried it on several macs and with different power supplys/usb cables(I own two of the same drive)

any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
It's formatted to osx journalled and i've tried verifying and repairing yeah, it gave some nonsense about being unable to unmount the disc.
 
It's on warranty so i'll just get it replaced, i'm more concerned with salvaging the data on it rather than anything else.

I've tried doing it in small sections too, it just says calculating time remaining and freezes.
 
It could be the case, either the port on it or its actual motherboard. If you don't plan on returning it and the contents of the drive is what's important then you can take out the drive inside and place it in a different enclosure (you can find some for ten bucks) and see if it works.
 
I think I'm going to have to just pay for the data recovery people. It seems to be the only way I won't void the warranty.
 
Mattaria said:
I think I'm going to have to just pay for the data recovery people. It seems to be the only way I won't void the warranty.
Click to expand...

Data recovery is usually pretty expensive and they also usually void the warranty because they open the enclosure. In difficult cases, they even open the actual hard drive.
 
Mattaria said:
I think I'm going to have to just pay for the data recovery people. It seems to be the only way I won't void the warranty.
Click to expand...

Before using a data recovery service, you could try the demos of Data Rescue or FileSalvage to see, if they can get somewhere.
If not, it would be still cheaper to extract the actual HDD from the enclosure and put it into a working one and try data recovery software again.
 
simsaladimbamba said:
Before using a data recovery service, you could try the demos of Data Rescue or FileSalvage to see, if they can get somewhere.
Click to expand...

I recently had a spate of bad drives (not mine, although that doesn't matter) and what I found is that Disk Warrior recovered the data on the first drive but wouldn't recover anything on the second. Because Disk Warrior was successful on the first drive I didn't need to try my old Data Rescue 2 (which wouldn't have run under Lion anyway).

When Disk Warrior couldn't do anything with the second drive, I upgraded to Data Rescue 3 and it got 100% of the second drive.

The second drive wouldn't mount at all, which may be why Disk Warrior couldn't do anything. Data Rescue 3 didn't seem to care whether it was mounted or not.

I don't know why that was, but that's what happened. Take-away lesson seems to be that just because one recovery package fails, don't assume that another will also fail. They use different approaches to the problem.

I'm keeping them both in my arsenal.

Data Rescue 3 has a trial version, so you can see whether it's going to work for you before paying.
 
simsaladimbamba said:
[...] try the demos of Data Rescue or FileSalvage to see, if they can get somewhere.
Click to expand...
Not "or", and. Try both. And Drive Warrior. And any others you can find (haven't used one in a few years, not up to speed on the current state of Mac file recovery software).

They all have their own, unique approach, so when one fails, another might succeed, yet.

.tsooJ
 
"this is the drive http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=260 when I connect it it takes hours(literally) to index and then spends hours preparing to transfer but doesn't actually start. Has ANYONE got any idea on how i can get it to work long enough to take 1.7 tb of data off of it without having to pay a data recovery company."

Yep.

Go to spotlight, and TURN INDEXING OFF for that drive. This can be done with the "privacy" option in spotlight. For my own usage, I have _ALL_ my drives set for "privacy". I don't want indexing at all, and I don't care for spotlight. Others' opinions may vary.

Suggestion for the future:
Consider partitioning your drives to reduce the overall size. A partition for video, another for audio, another for general data, etc.
 
Got data rescue, gonna install it onto my old macbook and leave it to clone the drive, even if it takes a lifetime. wish me luck!
 
Tried that, apparently it's going to take 6000 hours.....bad times. Back to the drawing board.
 
Have you tried moving your files individually? The most important ones first. I once sat on my external hard drive while it was running and damaged it. I managed to move some files out before it stopped working completely (hours indexing/preparing, refuse to mount/unmount etc). It's possible that only some sectors on the disk are bad and files in other sectors can still be transferred.
 
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