External HD/D refusing to mount

S

Sissyfoo

Registered
Hi there,

Last night I encountered a problem with my seagate FreeAgent external HD/D.

I right-clicked on the desktop icon to eject it as per usual and once the icon had vanished I pulled out the USB cable. However, I then got a message saying that I didn't eject the device properly and might have lost data blah blah etc.

When I plugged the external drive in this morning I found that it wouldn't mount. I am in a state of panic at the moment because it is almost 150gb of data that I really did not want to lose! I read in one of the previous threads that this is a common problem amongst macs but I wasn't able to discern if this was a permanent error and if it means my drive is shafted...

I ran disk utility and this is what it came up with :

Verifying volume “disk1s1”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Invalid node structure
Invalid B-tree node size
Invalid node structure
Invalid B-tree node size
The volume needs to be repaired.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


1 HFS volume checked
Volume needs repair

I tried to repair it using disk utility but it wasn't able to do it. I am now using the demo of Data Rescue II to do a thorough scan which will take several hours but I'm wondering what options I have. Are there any other mac tools I can use? I am a total newbie when it comes to macs having only made the transition from PC to Mac several months ago and I don't know what tools I can utilize to fix this problem, if it even CAN be fixed. :(

I really hope someone can help me!

Cheers,

James
 
I occasionally have problems w/external burners not showing up on my desktop. I have always been able to rectify this by powering off the drive, removing the interface cable, then reversing this procedure. Sometimes it makes a difference whether I connect the interface cable or the power first. Is it USB or Firewire. I suspect your hard drive problem might be something similar.
 
Sissyfoo,

This is not just a Mac problem. If you disconnect the hard drive in the middle of the write, you can corrupt data. You have some good choices for hard drive recovery:

1. Disk Warrior - Maybe a silly name, but this is a powerful disk recovery program that scavenges files and rebuilds the directory structure.

2. Techtool Pro - This is a complete disk repair, defrag, hardware test program.

There's at least one more that was highly rated. I believe the company is Coriolis.

I haven't personally used any of them (thank goodness! Mac user since 01), but I'm personally going to purchase Disk Warrior.

Good luck!

Doug
 
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Hi guys!

Thanks for the replies. I'm going to give Disk Warrior a try tonight and keep my fingers crossed. I was a bit freaked out when I wasn't even able to find any of the files on the drive but after some deep scanning with er, some scanning program which I forget the name of, I was able to find them so, phew!!

I'll let you know how I get on with Disk Warrior!

Cheerio,

James
 
Hurrar! After much worry, Disk Warrior worked a treat!! Two thumbs up from me and thanks heaps for your recommendations!!

Cheers!
 
when you ran disk warrior were you able to recover the data as well as the drive? or were you forced to reformat the drive in order to mount it?
 
Disk Warrior recovered everything. Either the drive wasn't as 'severely damaged' as some of those other repair programs insisted it was or disk warrior is just fantastic. I'd highly recommend it though.
 
SissyFoo... how were you able to get the drive to mount in order to run Disk Warrior? I am having similar troubles: Mac Disk Utility sees the hardware of my drive (250GB LaCie Little Disk, bus-powered), but will not mount the formatted volume.

When I open DW, it refers to my HD as "Unknown Disk" and says "Directory cannot be rebuilt, the file system is unsupported." and that "This disk does not appear on the desktop."

Do you recall which scanning software you used to get the drive to a place that DW could recognize/recover?

Any help is greatly appreciated!!!!
 
I hope you can help me. I have some friends that have tried & I've hit yet another dead end trying to get my buffalo HS500U2 to mount or even talk to my macbook.

My problem started after I connected the external harddrive to my husband's Dell. Now my mac doesn't see it. :p
So the errors I am recieving is supposedly b/c I corrupted it by not safely ejecting the drive or because it picked up a virus or something from his computer(I guess).

So I tried repairing my permissions on my computer harddrive. No luck. Tried to repair the external drive too, no luck. Then my friend suggested I needed to repair the directory for the drive.

When I tried to do so, with Alsoft DiskWarrior, it wont work :( This is the error message I am receiving:
- directory cannot be rebuilt, the file system is unsupported.
*This disk is not a macintosh disk
* this disk does not not appear on the desktaop
*this disk is 465.76GB in size
advanced:
*disk id: disk3s1
*sectors:978768002 (512 bytes each)
*drive format: FDisk partition scheme
*file system: windows/pc
*model: buffalo Inc. Usb-sata bridge

So I am guessing maybe if I use a progam like this on a pc I can get it to work. But I suspect that my husband's virus infected computer is what caused my problems... so I don't want to try it on his computer because I'm worried I'll lose everything.

I do have the option to reformat the drive, but if I do that I'll lose all 60GB of my college stuff & music etc...

WHAT I REALLY WANT OT KNOW IS IF THERE IS ANYWAY I CAN GET THIS TO WORK ON MY MAC OR IF I'M SCREWED & NEED TO FIND A PC THAT ISN'T INFECTED TO TRY TO REPAIR THE DIRECTORY ON...

Please help! :(

thanks EVERYONE
 
I was facing read data error on my 1TB OWC External FW800 drive. I was using softraid to configure the drives. The drives are a pair of WD 500Gb. Problem started when there was a power failure a week ago and from then the volume keep disconnected itself with softraid saying there is a Read Error on both partition. Yesterday, the drives was completely unrecognized.

Tried Genius and Tech Tool Pro to salvage the data. None were capable to do it. I then tried DiskWarrior and I managed to call back the drives. I am in the middle of transferring all my stuff to the new drives. But it keeps disconnecting and me reconnecting it back but at least I can still copy the files out.

I am going to reformat the drives using just Apple Disk Utility and throw away SoftRaid. My guess SoftRaid if see a problem will try to warn you but it will disrupt the OS. And thanks to this forum DiskWarrior save my day.

Anyone else facing the same problem?
 
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