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Has My External Drive Been Wiped Out?

J

JPM42

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 21, 2007
275
7
So I have a Western Digital external hard drive that I bought in anticipation of the Leopard release in October, 2007. And it's generally worked well, until now. After being away for a few days, I turned on my iMac and the external didn't pop up. So I unplugged it and plugged it in again and after doing this, nothing came up.

Finally, a message comes up, hours later saying that the disk couldn't be initialized and the like and Disk Utility pops up. And on Disk Utility, my external is popped up... yet it shows it has the full amount of space available and that it isn't formatted.

Keep in mind that I'm a musician, I record, produce and actually put all of those files on the external to prevent myself hassle and heartache from the iMac's drive going out.

But now that this has happened... has my external wiped out? You have no idea how much I am praying to hear the words: "No."

Thanks!
 
Thanks, guys. The problem is that, right now, the Mac (and my Macbook when I tried it) isn't even recognizing it at this point, so when I try to do a disk repair or something like that, I can't do it, because it's not recognizing it. What could this mean?
 
Matthew M. said:
Thanks, guys. The problem is that, right now, the Mac (and my Macbook when I tried it) isn't even recognizing it at this point, so when I try to do a disk repair or something like that, I can't do it, because it's not recognizing it. What could this mean?
Click to expand...
It could mean that the MBR/PBR is hosed (corrupted).

As I mentioned above, if you have access to a PC give SpinRite a shot. It rocks. :)

It will work when Disk Utilities, Disk Warrior and others will not work. I've had it work when a Mac formatted hard drive is not recognizable. As long as the hard drive is spooling (spinning) up when you start it, SpinRite may be able to recover the data. SpinRite has saved my bacon so many times I have lost count. It works very very well indeed and is well worth the price especially if you have valuable data that you want to recover.

Another option, is a data recover center. But their costs are much more than SpinRite so it might be worth a shot.
 
I don't know if it helps to mention that having an external hard drive does you no good if it is the only place that you store your data. If you had the data on your iMac and used the external hard drive as a data backup you wouldn't be in this mess.
 
miles01110 said:
Nowhere in the OP's post does he/she mention it being a "backup."
Click to expand...

I never said they did. I merely saying that if it had been used as a backup, instead of the sole point of storage, that the data would still be in the original location. I'm sure much stress could have been avoided.
 
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