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HELP!! I lost 200GB+ and need it back!

MVallee

MVallee

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 8, 2007
810
183
Ontario, Canada
I'm in crisis mode right now. I was re-formatting a hard drive to be FAT32 so I could use it to go between Mac and Windows. It went smoothly and I moved some files onto the hard drive, 230GB of them. Well that was yesterday since then I’ve switched the hard drive in the enclosure and re-formatted another hard drive, which also worked fine.

Today I hooked up the first hard drive again and I got an error message that said, “the disk you inserted was not readable by this computer” it asks me to initialize, ignore or eject.

Where did all my files go???? Why in the disk utility does it not show the partition anymore? And is it possible to get them back? I haven’t done anything to it yet.

I have no clue what caused this.

Any help would be really appreciated. This is a lot of info to lose and I really need it back.
 
first thing I would do is to find a windows machine, and see if windows can recognize the disk and read the data.
 
I have bootcamp installed and tryed it on windows and it says that the disk needs to be formatted.

I don't know if i should format the disk or initialize it, or if that will overwrite anything.
 
MVallee said:
I have bootcamp installed and tryed it on windows and it says that the disk needs to be formatted.

I don't know if i should format the disk or initialize it, or if that will overwrite anything.
Click to expand...

Don't format it, it'll just mean everything is harder to recover.

I think you should try accessing it through terminal. (not too good with terminal but want to reply quickly to top you formatting it)
 
Ok I won't reformat it. I tried that recovery apllication that was suggested but it crashes everytime I selcted the hard drive that needs help. I think its because it has no partition on it now.

I've never used terminal. I've only had a mac for 6 months.
 
MVallee said:
Ok I won't reformat it. I tried that recovery apllication that was suggested but it crashes everytime I selcted the hard drive that needs help. I think its because it has no partition on it now.

I've never used terminal. I've only had a mac for 6 months.
Click to expand...

I was posting that in the hope someone will read it and give you specific instructions on how to access the drive.

Fire up terminal from Utilities.
And type in "diskutil list" without quotes and hit enter. report back the results.
 
This is what it said

terminaldp1.jpg
 
it shows

Matts-MacBook:~ Matt$ diskutil mount disk1s1
Volume disk1s1 mounted
Matts-MacBook:~ Matt$

but no disk shows up as being mounted. When I open the disk utility program it shows that the partition that once was there is not there anymore.
 
I'm running out of my experience base here. I would suggest one more thing but as the drive doesn't have a name which suggests (as well as what you have already told us) that there is corruption, in not sure how to navigate into it.

There is one more possibility that i know of the "dd" command but that would require you to have another drive the same size to transfer it too and the abilities and success of that command I am not sure.

Really hope someone who knows what they are talking about more than I do jumps in now.
 
Anyone with any other ideas?

I'm using a Windows program now called Test Disk which is supposed to find and repair damaged partitions but it can't find any partitions on the drive.

I have no idea why this happened. I'm trying to figure it out but can't think of any explanation.
 
If it were me I would buy another external HD of about 300gb at least and try on both a Mac and a PC to either dupe the drive or to recover the drive contents (on a Mac you would use Data Rescue). I would not format it or initialize it (same thing as formatting but could confuse a longtime PC user). There is the possibility that your OS X setup is somehow corrupted. For example, I once had a program on my Mac that would not allow a partition to be mounted, but it had to do with the 128 GB limit on earlier Macs. Perhaps part of the Windows/Bootcamp process screwed up your Macs ability to read the newly formatted disk. Do you have a permanent setup yet on your Mac? Would it be possible to reformat the whole thing from scratch while NOT using Bootcamp at all? (In other words, could you dump the Windows partition without losing anything important, or could you back up the important files or programs from the computer onto DVDs and then do a fresh wipe of the hard drive and a fresh install of OS X only?)

That would be a big step, so before I did that, I'd get a friend with another Mac and another with a PC to try and read the disk. If it can't be read by other computers as well then you know it is not your computer specifically and then you could ignore doing the above drastic steps to try and fix it.

Also, please be more specific as to what you did when formatting this disk. What enclosure was it in? What jumper settings (if any) were set on the drive (or was it a SATA drive)? Does the second hard drive you formatted work properly when hooked the exact same way in the exact same enclosure when formatted in the same format and when hooked to a Mac? A PC? What computer was it hooked to when formatting the bad hard drive? The same question for the second hard drive? What computer was used when copying the files? Did the same computer have no trouble reading the files immediately after? Did you power down the computer before unhooking/hooking the external hard drive? Any other specifics you can share may give clues as to what happened.
 
Oh Oh

My hard drive froze while tranfering,(I think I might have overloaded it by transfering to and from at the same time).

When I plugged it back in, my mbp said disk not readable "initialize... Ignore" Not knowing, I clicked Initialize and now all my files seem to be gone(about 200gb)

I've tried data rescue, dosn't find anything.

Someone please tell me theres something I can do?

I think I'll cry if i loose everything. Its like my house burned down!
 
If it's formatted for Mac, I would say Disk Warrior.

However it's formatted for PC, so maybe a PC utility?
 
When you say you tried data rescue, do you mean this:

http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

...if so, and you did the "Thorough Scan" (not just the quick one), and it came up with nothing, I wouldn't hold out much hope of retrieving anything. TechTool Pro also has a system to try and scavenge files off of a corrupted disk, but in my experience if Data Rescue II doesn't find anything, TTP definitely won't either.

Data Rescue II is free to try, but if you're desperate and it's no good, you might as well pay for a TTP license. At least you can use the rest of its drive maintenance features in the future.

Drive recovery services are available, but they usually cost several thousand dollars.
 
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