External Seagate Hard Drive Will Not Mount

[Jakerno]

I've been using a Seagate FreeAgent 500gb external for almost a year with Paragon NTFS for Mac. Recently I've switched to NTFS-3G because it seemed to have faster performance than Paragon. But a couple of days ago when I plugged it in, my Mac popped this message up:

I went into Disk Utility and this is what I saw,

.

It doesn't have any info on space, or anything really. I underlined (NTFS-3G) because I thought maybe the Pref pane, NTFS-3G might have done something to the Drive. I suppose it should just say "Windows NT Filesystem".

On a windows computer I got this dialog box. But my drive was working perfectly fine a few days ago!

If anyone out here could give me some advice or help on what to do, that would be wonderful! I simply have no idea why it decided to not to work and I have some very important files on my drive.. I'm running on an early 2008 Macbook Pro, with Leopard OSX.

 

[Makosuke]

You obviously have a badly corrupted NTFS volume. Since Windows doesn't like it, either, it's clearly not an NTFS Mac driver issue.

One of three things probably caused it:

1) Terrible luck. Even if it had been working perfectly for months, today could always be the day that something randomly went haywire, something you might never see happen again.

2) The hardware is failing. I'd worry about this--not all corruption like that is caused by a hardware failure, but hardware failure will almost certainly cause issues like that if it happens.

3) NTFS-3G either has a bug, or couldn't handle some underlying corruption in the filesystem that hadn't previously been obvious because Paragon NTFS was able to silently work around it.

There really isn't any easy way to determine which of the three happened in your case apart from fixing/reformatting the drive and using it some more to see if it happens again.

As for recovering data, you could try either Windows data recovery programs (I like Data Rescue 3 on the Mac, and there is a Windows version, or the Mac one might even support NTFS) or repair software, and hope stuff can be salvaged. Remember, it's always a matter of when, not if, a drive will fail, regardless of the format or hardware, so keep backups of anything you don't want to lose.