iPartition corrupted my external hard drive, help!

[dred]

If you are familiar with partitioning/resizing, using iPartition, or recovering data from a corrupt disk, perhaps you can assist me. I tried to resize my 1 TB FAT32 Seagate Freeagent external hard drive which has about 600 GB of media. I asked iPartition to resize my current disk and add a 60 GB partition because I want to run Wii WBFS files from this partition. I started the process without backing up my data (I know, stupid) and it was taking forever so I let it go over night, not allowing my Macbook to sleep. In the morning I woke up to see an error message from iPartition saying the program failed to read from my external and now it doesn't mount and the disk is corrupted. I'm looking into recovery options now, but I don't want to pay $100 for a program that I'm not sure will work. Any help will be greatly appreciated!

 

[Fishrrman]

"In the morning I woke up to see an error message from iPartition saying the program failed to read from my external and now it doesn't mount and the disk is corrupted. I'm looking into recovery options now, but I don't want to pay $100 for a program that I'm not sure will work. Any help will be greatly appreciated!"

If iPartition can't "pick up where it left off", it looks like a file recovery program is going to be the ONLY option you have left, short of taking the drive to a data recovery outfit, which is going to charge you a LOT of money to get the data back from it.

Suggestion:
Try one of these first:
- Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery
- Data Rescue 3
- Disk Drill
(google to find them)

See if they can successfully scavenge the data and create a database of the files. All of them do this for free.

You only pay AFTER you are satisfied that the programs have a halfway-decent chance of scavenging and recovering the data.

Oh, one other thing and YOU CANNOT GET AROUND THIS.

You MUST have a SECOND hard drive to which the scavenged files get recovered.

So you need to buy something BEFORE you attempt to do data recovery on your own. I suggest you get working on this right away.

I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you get one of these:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=usb+sata+dock&x=0&y=0
(many items shown, they all connect and work the same, a cheap one will do as well for you as a more expensive one)

And then get a "bare" hard drive from the vendor of your choice (I suggest newegg.com).

When you have the drive & dock, put the drive into the dock, connect it to the Mac, start everything up, and initialize the bare drive using Disk Utility.

You will then have a "scratch drive" ready for the data recovery apps to use.

YES, all this is GOING TO COST YOU MONEY.

That's "the price" you pay for not backing up first.

If you're not willing to pay the price, kiss that data goodbye.

 

[Hirakata]

I think you may be out of luck as far as not spending any money. I've run across this with iPartition as well (although I still love the program...). I use Diskwarrior. Best money I've spent on a utility. Your drive probably has a corrupt directory which Diskwarrior will take care of.

And although it doesn't help you now, whenever I run iPartition these days, I run iDefrag beforehand. This way, you'll have one contiguous empty space to be partitioned. In my experience, if your drive is fragmented, iPartition has a hard time creating a large empty partition.

Good luck.

 

[dred]

Suggestion:
Try one of these first:
- Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery
- Data Rescue 3
- Disk Drill
(google to find them)

Good luck.

Thanks for the advice! I have some hope now. Luckily, I have an old LaCie firewire HDD to copy any recovered files to. I tried Diskwarrior and the program did not recognize my drive as mountable so I couldn't run any diagnostics. Now I'm running Disk Drill and it seems to be finding some files, so we'll see in a few hours from now how they turn out. I won't give up on iPartition, but I will definitely backup in the future and run defrag before changing partitions. Does anyone have any recommendations on backup methods? Have you used Disk Drill's Recovery Vault utility? Thanks!

 

[nikolasmedina]

The same thing just happened to me a few days ago, I tried to recover the partition with testdisk but it didn't help at all, now im trying to get the files but I cant find a proper program to do it, I would like to know how the Disk Drill does to recover the files, if I can find a good way to do it I will post it ASAP.
Thanks in advance

 

[dred]

scanning

I'll let you know how my recovery using Disk Drill goes. I have about 6 more hours of scanning left. I think I have a lot of work ahead of me because it's finding lots of files, but none of the original file names are associated with them and new file names are assigned like, "file00034". We'll see...