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davidgarciaphot

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 21, 2014
1
0
one of my everyday hard drives will not read on my iMac now which I use all the time.the front light on the hard drive just flashes fast but it appears in my disk utilityand when I go to repair it it says it can't be repaired in that I need to reformat it. this is happened to other times and I was able to restart the computer and the hard drive appeared does anybody have any suggestions
 
It's a bit expensive, but there's no better set of tools than Disk Warrior:

http://www.alsoft.com/diskwarrior/

If there's anything can be done to save your disk and data (short of sending it away to a specialist data recovery firm) then Disk Warrior is your best bet.
 
If you by chance are able to get the problem drive "mounted again" on the Mac, my suggestion is that you connect ANOTHER drive to the Mac right away, and try to copy anything you can from the problem drive.

Even if the data sectors on the drive are ok, it sounds like there are directory problems.

What I would do in your situtation:
1. Get another drive (or, get a "bare" drive and a USB3/SATA docking station, go to amazon and enter "usb3 sata dock" into the search box)
2. Try to get the problem drive mounted, and copy all the files to the second drive
3. RE-initialize the problem drive with Disk Utility and test it by running "repair disk" on it a few times
4. If it looked ok and passed all the tests, then I'd re-copy data back to it. But I'd ALSO keep copies of the most important data (the stuff I absolutely didn't want to lose) on another drive, as well.
 
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