Hello,

I had an external HDD that one day suddenly doesn't get mounted anymore... o_O (it didn't fall or anything)
It gets recognized in the disk utility, but I cannot mount it.
I would love to recover my files. It's formatted for macs.

I tried DiskWarrior, but I can't seem to get that installed, after extracting it I just have a file with no extension, no iso or anything. So I do not know how to get that up and running. ^^ (and I have no money for the actual dvd ><)

When I went to the apple store they said they might* be able to do it for 80 euros.... =.=
Which I don't have... xD


Is there anyone who can help me in anyway to get a recovery of my files on the HDD?

Thanks for any insights, advice, tips, software information, etc...

[Katsuo]

There are data recovery utilities available on the Mac App store, but I haven't tried any of them. Some free utilities look for files to see what could be recovered, but you normally have to pay to upgrade to the main utility to actually recover them.

I noticed one called "Data Recovery Free" which will get some kinds of file for free, i.e. certain picture and music formats.

If no one can help you here, then try the Apple discussions site.

could be an issue with the power supply, in which case the data could still be intact. Otherwise you'll probably need to pay to have the data recovered. Actually you'll probably have to pay anyway to get the drive put in a new non-faulty case (unless you're confident you can do it yourself).

Good luck. Hard-drive failure sucks.

[ファブリス]

If it's seen by Disk Utility perhaps the boot sector was messed up? or the file system somehow? In that case I would Google Up for "disk repair" or something like that, something that checks for errors in the file system. I never had the issue yet so I can't help furhter. Definitely ask on Apple forum's or Macrumors.com forums maybe.

It's too late in your case, unfortunately, but there is simply no excuse for not having a backup strategy. To another computer, or a server in the 'cloud', or even your most important files to DVDs from time to time.

stellar phoenix, recuvr, r-studio and recover my files are all supposedly good. Sorry if you lost any data.

Your disk probably just needs a good fsck. Since it's external, there's a chance you unmounted it in a way it didn't like, ruining the journal (or something), and now the OS refuses to mount it, by design, in order to preserve the data on it so you can fix it. (But shouldn't the OS also try and fix it for you? I dunno...must be a Mac thing. Pay us money to fix it for you...!).

The operating system will tell you useful things as it does the things it does. Try going to a terminal and running this:

Code:

tail -f /var/log/dmesg

Then plug in the disk and look for anything odd as it tries to mount it. (dmesg is basically the log for drivers and one of the most useful tools to find hardware problems).

I say you stand a good shot at getting the filesystem back if you boot a Linux machine (say, a live CD), and making use of the fsck.hfsplus command. I'm sure there are guides to help you if you google.