Repairing/Recovering data from a Firewire hard drive that does not mount

[klpguy]

My external Firewire Hard drive stopped mounting about a week ago after working flawlessly for over 2 years. The drive spins away, but does not appear on the desktop. I was told by somebody that Norton Utilities for the Macintosh can be used to repair the drive. Does anybody know if this is true? I use this hard drive with a G4 Titanium Powerbook running Mac OSX 10.3.9. I have unsuccessfully tried mounting the hard drive on several other Mac and PC computers, so I'm sure the problem is with the drive and not the computer. Any tips on how to fix this?

Thanks,

[nixgeek]

DO NOT USE NORTON UTILITIES!!!

NU will cause more problems for you than what you are having now. I'm hoping that you haven't used it yet.

If you need a good utilities program, get DiskWarrior.

As for options, have you tried removing the drive from the Firewire enclosure and see if you can add it internally to a Power Mac tower or some other Mac?

Before you do any of this, you might want to try mounting it with Disk Utility and see if that works. You might be able to run a disk check on it from there depending on the filesystem type of the external drive.

Good luck.

[klpguy]

Thanks for pointing me toward Disk Utility and Disk Warrior. Alas, neither has managed to repair my hard drive. I found the following with these programs. I'm hoping a moreknowledgeable and experienced hand might be able to diagnose what ails the drive.


1) When repairing the defective hard drive with Disk Utility, I get the message "Disk Utility stopped repairing 'FireLite' because the following error was encountered: The underlying task reported failure on exit". After getting through a bit less than 1/2 of the repair process (according to the progress bar), the disk seems to get into an infinite loop and starts spinning aimlessly.

The program log contains the following:

Verifying volume “FireLite”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid sibling link
Invalid B-tree Header
Invalid map node
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
The volume FireLite needs to be repaired.

Volume check failed.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972)

1 volume checked
0 HFS volumes repaired
1 volume could not be repaired


2) I tried to rebuild the directory using Disk Warrior. Like Disk Utility, this program also causes the disk to get into an infinite loop where it spins aimlessly. This happens a bit less than 1/2 of the way through the process of rebuilding the directory. The progress bar says the program is at Step 5 of the repair process (Step 5: Locating directory data ...). The progress bar also indicates as an aside -- "Speed inhibited by disk malfunction". I have to use Force Quit to get the disk out of this infinite loop.

So it looks like both Disk Utility and Disk Warrior are choking at a similar point. I'm fearful that this means there is an unrecoverable mechanical problem with the drive. Any insights? Thanks for your opinion.

[reeze]

I would try Data Rescue: http://www.prosofteng.com/products/d...b129b75804660e

I just had the fun experience of two external FW drives being corrupted (this will be the subject of my own thread here begging for help soon!). I lost a few partitions on one of them, and the other one was completely unreadable--it caused a KP when I tried to mount it. Data Rescue couldn't fix the second drive but, on the first, it found the missing partitions and gave me the option of recovering files from them. You can download and try it out for free--it'll only recover one file per session but you'll know whether it'll work for you or not. Good luck and HTH.

[klpguy]

Thanks for the pointer toward Data Rescue. I'll try it out tonight. I'm not too optimistic though, because on the surface, Data Rescue does not appear to be all that different than Disk Warrior. Reeze: Good luck with your second drive.

[reeze]

Data Rescue helped me where DW couldn't. I only had an older version (ran in OS9) but DW couldn't see the unreadable partition. According to the docs, DW needs to see a "valid partition map."

I was able to connect the second drive while booted into OS9. Two of the three partitions wouldn't mount, and presented me with an alert saying the disk was "not a Mac OS disk" and would I like to initialize it. I said no, then used Disk First Aid and it repaired one of the two bad partitions. Alas, the remaining bad partition still wouldn't let me connect the drive while booted into X (instant KP), so I went back to OS9 and just initialized the two partitions. Now the drive works in X, but of course all the data from those partitions is gone.

Good luck with your drive and let us know what happens!

[klpguy]

Data Rescue to the rescue. Thanks for pointing me to it. It managed to rescue an important file with the demo version. I'll happily pay for the full version in order to rescue the remaining important files. It's good of them to have a demo version that can be used to see if the program works.

Disk Warrior, unfortunately, doesn't have such a demo feature so you're out of luck and money if it doesn't work. Oh well! Different business models for different folks.

Sridhar

[reeze]

Glad it worked for you. Like I said, without a partition map it's possible Disk Warrior wouldn't have helped you at all.

BTW, I know you see that Data Rescue II has a 5-meg limit on the file size it recovers while running as a demo. AFAICT, Data Rescue *I*, which is what I have, doesn't have this limitation (only the one-file-at-a-time limit).