internal hard drive not mounting

[ttt]

I have a secondary internal drive on my mac.

One day I got an error message something along the lines of the mac couldn't read the disk. The volume disappeared from the desktop. Then it started making odd knocking sounds!

On occasion, the manufacture/disk size does appear in DISK UTILITY (as well as the hardware options in DISK WARRIOR).

However the volume name does not appear in DISK UTILITY (nor the directory list in DISK WARRIOR).

How can I access my files to recover them?

Thanks in advance!

[Satcomer]

The drive fail. Sometime a trick that works is to take the drive out, put it into a freezer proof watertight bag and freeze the hard drive.

Then take the drive out and quickly put it in the computer and quickly get the data you need of it before it thaws out.

Sometime the freezer thing works but sometimes it does not if the drive is to far gone. If that is the case you have to take it to a drive platter saving service.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Like Satcomer said, your drive sounds like it failed mechanically. While your data is still on the platters, the mechanics of the drive have failed somewhere and the drive is, well, toast. There's not much you, specifically, can do to the drive.

Originally Posted by ttt

How can I access my files to recover them?

You cannot access the files since the drive has failed. You can use a data recovery service like Satcomer said, but they're expensive -- starting at about $500 and extending into the thousands of dollars depending on what kind of data you want to retrieve, how much of it there is, and the severity of the drive damage.

You can fiddle with the drive a bit -- freezing it like Satcomer recommended is always a good first step. Sometimes taking the drive out and banging it flat on the desk once with a decent amount of force can "unstick" a stuck read/write head. Sometimes it may cause even more damage, though. The point is that a failed drive is a failed drive -- while they may sporadically come back to life, chances are that the drive is gone and the data along with it.

The easiest way to get at those files is to simply restore the files from the backups that you regularly make.