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External HD incident, how screwed am I?

R

Ryan Ross

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 22, 2005
13
0
So I have my external hard drive sitting on the floor in front of the couch and as I lift my foot it catches the cord and lifts it about 1/2 inch then drops back on the hardwood floor (-3 points for stupidity). The drive was ejected at the time but it was still powered on.

It's partitioned into 3 drives, and now when I connect to it, only 2 of the 3 drives shows up on my desktop (with the missing drive having all the music production files ive ever had). Is there anything I can do to try to recover/find it? Or am I totally hooped?

ps. I dont need any "youre a dumbass" comments, Im already scarred enough!
 
It's a very good sign you can see even 2 of the 3 partitions. I highly recommend that, if at all possible, you back up any important data from those areas before proceeding.

That said, you might want to download the "Try" version of Data Rescue II, which will at least tell you if it can see any files there. If so, things are looking good. If not... they aren't. You could try Disk Warrior, but I don't think it has a trial version, and it's also $100.
 
Thanks for the help, its appreciated. Im scanning right now, is it normal that it says its going to take 1260.4 hours??
 
Data Rescue take a LONG time because it attempts to reconstruct the information from each and every bit on the drive. Always try Diskwarrior FIRST (actually, try Apple's Disk Utility: Repair Disk first but presumably you have done that ) - You want to repair the damaged volume information and catalogs first, if you can.
 
^^^
I actually hadnt tried that yet. When I did I got this message

-------------------------------------------------------
Verify and Repair disk “MUSIC”
** /dev/disk1s1
** Phase 1 - Read FAT
Unable to read FAT (Input/output error)
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
-------------------------------------------------------

Does that give any clues?
 
Wait... I just noticed that there is the option to "mount" the drive because its unmounted. Should I do that or will it mess things up? (sorry if this is a newbie question, im not too techy and I appreciate the help very much!)
 
Nevermind, I tried and it didnt work. Said to run disk repair then try again, but disk repair doesnt work.
 
If these are critical files (for work or something) I would suggest sending the drive to one of those data recovery places. Its safer and you will probably get better results.
 
crazzyeddie said:
Its safer and you will probably get better results.
Click to expand...

And cost you an arm and a leg.. just so you're not shocked when they ask for $200 to look at it, and $hundreds to $thousands to recover data.
 
yellow said:
And cost you an arm and a leg.. just so you're not shocked when they ask for $200 to look at it, and $hundreds to $thousands to recover data.
Click to expand...

data doctors are really only for LIFE & DEATH files, records, financial stuff etc. Something that can warrant the time and effort to recover the data.

When you think about it, a failed drive is not the end of the world.

The magnetic +/- (1s and 0s) of the disc(s) are still physically there, which make up all the data. Even if the read head fails, or some sort of data conundrum kills the drive, your data is still there.

Same idea when you delete something, its not really gone, its just marked "available for write", and CAN be written over. But its still there.

So in essence a data recovery place will open the drive and use their own means to read the 0s and 1s of your data, which could take lots of time per bit, but it will come out.

Its hard work, worth it in some cases, but certainly not in others.
 
The files arent that critical that I would spend hundreds of dollars to get them back... (maybe if I wasnt a student!).

Heres the update, Ive got version 3.0 of Alsoft Disk Warrior and when I run it none of my external hard drive stuff pops up for rebuild (even the 2 partitions that are on my desktop). Is there anything I can do to make it recognize it? I know its not totally gone because in disk utility it still shows its there but its "unmounted" and disk util wont repair it...
 
I've now got version 3.0.3 after finding out that 3.0.0 might not work, but it still wont identify my external drives at all. Could it have something to do with the fact that they are formatted at FAT32?
 
Data Rescue II was able to recover almost all of an 80 GB drive that nothing else could fix. The full scan and retrieve took almost 8 days though. Ugh. Try everything else and then DRII.
 
Holy, are there any other programs other than DRII?? Its been on since yesterday and its still saying that its going to take 1500 hours! I dont really have 2 months to leave this thing on in the same spot...

Also, does anyone know if disk warrior recognizes FAT 32 file systems?
 
Ok, thanks :) Is there anything similar to disk warrior that I should try that works on FAT 32? If not, I have a pc that I can hook this thing up to, so is there something for pc that might work better (aka, not 2 months?) I'm fully a mac convertee, but desperate times call for desperate measures...
 
if you have a PC available try spinrite6.0 if by dropping the drive you caused some damaged sectors it can sometimes copy the data from these damaged sectors to a good sector.

in some cases it can even test and "restore" sectors marked as bad.


Might be worth a shot, don't think they have a trial though and again its not cheap.

The other BIG problem is you'd need a PC to run it on as there isnt a mac version.
 
My 2 cents in here...

My 200 gig external took a dump once... I used Data Rescue II and did a "Thorough Scan"... It took about 8-9 hrs for it to complete it's scan... I started the scan before I left to work... It was able to recover pretty much everything on there....

I bought another 200 gig drive and external case and backed up everything that it was able to rescue... It was a life saver.. I had ALL my .mp3's (about 48 gigs worth) in there and rescued all of it....
 
Just wondering what you mean by "ejected" If the drive was still spun up it may have scratched the disk. Which would mean part of the disk is dead. But with a any luck it was a relatively small spot It (the catologue:confused: ) So you may have some luck with the recovery programs.
 
trainguy77 said:
Just wondering what you mean by "ejected" If the drive was still spun up it may have scratched the disk. Which would mean part of the disk is dead. But with a any luck it was a relatively small spot It (the catologue:confused: ) So you may have some luck with the recovery programs.
Click to expand...

It's a usb drive... I did the right click on the icon and "ejected" it, so that it was no longer connected, which I *think* means nothing should have been accessing the drive at the time it happened. Although the drive was still powered on.

I tried running data rescue II, but after like 2 straight days of it being on, and the projected time remaining still being about 1500 hours, I cancelled the scan and decided to try something on the pc. So I had it hooked up for about a day running a scanning program and then my drunken brother decides that he needs to show a girl the lyrics to some song and he unplugs the HD from the computer without ejecting while it was running (greeeat, like I needed more potential issues).

So here I sit, trying to decide what the hell to do... Im "analyzing" the device with DRII right now just to get a better idea whats going on, then Im thinking maybe that spinrite program would be the best option (though im my pc isnt very trustworthy) because im fairly sure there is some damage. Whenever I do a scan, the majority of items that pop up are "error reading"...

Man, this will sure teach me not to back up my stuff...
 
Update: After analyzing the drive, all of the read times are well below that red line (that supposed to indicate trouble?). So I guess thats one good thing!
 
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