MAC External Hardrive has a virus?

D

dlockcarr

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MAC External Hardrive has a virus?
What can I do ? I want to save everything on the external hard drive. Any suggestions
I was searching the web for a information on something opened up a forum then about 5 ads poped up all had in the URL my IP address (I think ) I shut down my computer and re -booted it now my computer can't save anything to my hardrive and it only shows up in the disk utilities. Not on my desktop. my information is still on it as far as I know.
I have also run disk utilities repair disk and tried to repair it about 6 times and I tried to Download program that find and. Remove virus but none have helped and there are only a few for Mac's what do I do I just want all my information safe and able to get to there is so much important information what do I do ?
 
It doesn't have a virus. The directory structure is probably just hosed. It would help if you could tell us what disk utility was showing. But if disk utility wouldn't repair it, you'll most likely need this.
 
I take it that when you ran Disk Utility to do the disk repair, that you were booted from the install DVD.
Disk Repair cannot repair the disk it is running from.
 
Sounds like a hard drive that is either:

a) physically damaged, or
b) has some kind of corruption of data at some level.

You may or may not be able to fix it (which is why we don't even need to ask about you having a backup, because EVERYone keeps backups). Kind of like breaking a clay pot: sometimes you can put it back together, and sometimes it's just too damaged to do anything with.

If the drive is physically damaged (which it doesn't sound like it is, but you never know), then replace the drive itself.

If the drive just has some level of data corruption (which sounds more likely), then you can use Disk Utility to try and repair the drive, or you can also use the more powerful Disk Warrior software (which can take hours and hours to "fix" the drive). If the data cannot be recovered and the problem is simply a badly corrupted directory on the drive, then you can always repartition and reformat the drive to get it back up and running -- this wipes all the data off the drive, though. If none of those work to fix the drive, then it's likely you'll never recover the data unless you want to spend $500 or more with a professional data-recovery service.

None of this is guaranteed -- sometimes a drive can be "fixed", and sometimes it cannot.

If you cannot repair the drive, and it is truly damaged beyond salvation, then you would simply replace the hard drive with a new one and restore the data from the backups that you regularly keep.
 
So what will it do ? Will it repair my disk ? would it not be better to get a program that would extract the information and save it on another device
 
dlockcarr said:
So what will it do ? Will it repair my disk ? would it not be better to get a program that would extract the information and save it on another device
Click to expand...

DiskWarrior would be better. It will put everything back together and rebuild the directory structure. It will even give you a preview window of the optimized directory structure to which you may even be able to make a complete image of before you go through with the replacement of the directory structure. What you are thinking of is data recovery software which will probably recover everything but will not recover it in a way that won't maintain the current directory structure. It will just dump everything in folders according to file type such as images, office docs, etc..Also you will probably get back everything that you haven't securely deleted. DiskWarrior may even make the drive completely operational again whereas data recovery software will not do anything but recover data.
 
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