S.O.S hard drive

[frankthif]

I'm using a 250 g external usb drive with my macbook. Yesterday, I've shut down the laptop and the drive and everything was fine. Today when I tried to plug the usb drive in I had an error message "disk inserted is not readable by this computer". I tried different ports, different computers (other macbook, same specs) nothing was working. I could not read the drive. I tried techtools pro. Nothing worked.
I downloaded Diskwarrior 4... I've repaired the directory. 50 gigs were lost in the process! Disappeared!!!! Now the disk mounts, I can see the files, but they all seem corrupted. I can't open a document even if they all seem there... Tried Data Rescue, no luck!

What is going on? Can I retrieve the files deleted by Diskwarrior? Can I manage to work with the corrupted files? I have 2 years of back-up, music projects and final cut projects in there. I'm completely desperate. Did I lost 2 years of my life and work???? Please help me!!

I'm running Leopard 10.5.4 on a 2ghz intel core2duo macbook.

 

[nixgeek]

How have you been disconnecting the drive? Have you dragged the drive to the Trash or selected to eject the drive before unplugging it from the Mac's USB port? If not, then this would be the reason for the hard drive failure. Improperly umounting the drive by simply disconnecting it can corrupt the data because the drive was not allowed to make the final writes to itself when properly unmounted. The same goes for USB flash drives. They ALL must be unmounted by either dragging to the Trash (the Trash icon then changes to an "eject" icon), selecting to eject the drive from the contextual menu, or clicking on the little eject icon next to the drive showing on the left sidebar of the Finder window. Unmounting external drives properly is something that pertains to all operating systems as well.

Also, don't shut off the external drive until you've ejected it from the operating system as that will also prevent those final writes and checks to take place, causing data corruption. Unmount the drive by ejecting it from the OS, then unplug the USB cable, then turn the drive off. When connecting it back to the computer, turn the drive on and then plug into the USB port of the computer. This is the order that I always use for external drives now (learned this through trial and error and the sacrifice of one hard drive).

Please keep this tips in mind for the future.

You might want to give DiskWarrior a try. It's not cheap, but if your data is valuable to you then the price won't matter. At the very worst, you might have to take your hard drive to a data recovery company like DriveSavers and have them recover it. Be warned that this last option will make the cost of DiskWarrior look like pennies, but again if your data is very valuable to you, then the cost won't matter.

Good luck.