Unmountable External Drive

[tophergt]

I have a 160 gb external drive that I keep my music, videos, and photos on. After restarting the other day, it failed to mount properly and instead gave me an error to the likes of "disk not readable," with the options to ignore, eject, or initialize. I've read some other threads on this, andI tried using the disk utility to no avail ("Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit"). I got a copy of FileSalvage, but it doesn't seem to be able to detect my m4a files or maintain the file names/folders as they were . . . is there any way I can recover all these files and not have to re-import them into iTunes? I still have the xml library file and the iTunes Library data file in tact.

Thanks

 

[mad jew]

Maybe try the disk on another machine. Different machines have different luck with failing disks like this. Good luck.

 

[2nyRiggz]

^Indeed. If you give the drive a rest for awhile it might catch itself and return to normal.


Bless

 

[tophergt]

I did try it on a friend's iBook G4, and it got the same error. Will giving it some "time off" actually change anything? I didn't know that drives could sort themselves out over a long weekend Thanks again.

 

[mad jew]

Letting it physically cool down might help. In fact, when my iPod was having hard drive troubles, I found that making a waterproof ice bucket for it helped immensely. Also, if it's a USB connection then using a Windows might be a good idea (if possible). As much as it pains me to say this, Windows sometimes (often) has better luck mounting dodgy drives via USB compared with Macs. Well, that's my experience. Good luck.




P.S. That still no reason to buy a Dell!