Hey all,

a few days ago i was running my mac pretty harshly, like having heaps of apps open and everything going at once, so it was unresponsive from time to time, then i eventually had to force-shut down because itunes and safari just WOULDN'T quit, so it's turned off right, then i power it up again and the start up tone just kept playing over and over on a loop so i took out the battery and left it overnight to 'cool off'.
Anyway, when i had to force-shut down, i was trying to eject my external hard drive, but the finder was unresponsive, so yeah i just yanked the cord out... so now when i plug it back in, nothing whatsoever seems to happen; but when i unplug it, a message pops up saying:

"Disk Insertion
The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.
(then the options are
Initialize..., Ignore or Eject."

Initialize just opens the disk utility app.

my 12,000-song music library was all on that hard drive; so i'll be a bit ticked off if that's lost!

any help is greatly appreciated!

PS: when i chose to externally-base my music library, i also wanted to get a 160GB iPod.. (money was the issue) so then this wouldn't worry meas mush... but since i have no other copies of my music, im really worried!

Get hold of disk warrior to see if that will resurrect the drive.

How was it formatted (ie, HFS+, FAT)?

Do you have a computer around? Take it out of the external and plug straight into a PC. See what happens there...

I had a similar problem when i was on windows (which evenually caused me to think about getting a Mac) - All i did was put the HD inside the PC and it recognised it straight away. If it is formatted as HFS+, use MacDisk.

Good luck,
d

Whatever you do. Do NOT write any data to the disk, do as the above poster said.

Remember to have a drive of equal or more space to dump it onto.

I have been down this road before, it is not fun.

thanks for the replies,
i'll try connecting it to a pc. (thankfully it's working, and its xp!)

what about Data Rescue II?
it can dump the files on to dvds..
because i don't currently have a drive of equal/more space to dump the files onto.

but the drive doesn't even appear in disk utility.
This is what prosoft/data rescue had to say:

"What if the drive doesn't show up in Disk Utility?
If the drive is not recognized in Disk Utility, then Data Rescue II will not be able to see it either. The fact that the drive is not showing up in Disk Utility is most likely a sign that there may be some hardware issues with your drive. You may try to put the drive into a separate enclosure to see if that fixes the issue (that may allow the drive to be seen in Disk Utility)."

Try Diskwarrior. That might be able to repair the disk. Then run disk utilities to also repair the disk.

Could be a controller failure?

is there some way of not paying US$99 for Diskwarrior?

or any other alternative programs that does the same thing and a good job of it too?

Seriously - part with the money for the software AND a good size hard drive.
You won't go wrong.
Having a computer without back-up is like buying golf clubs and not forking out for the bag.
We've had to do a couple of rescues here and it beats outsourcing the work by many factors!!
What's your library worth to you and any other missing info? It's time isn't it!?

And cause this has happened once - learn the lesson of backing up.
Your important stuff is worth 1 or 2 additional copies or HD's.
Here endeth the sermon.

Backups are great for solving this type of problem.

Diskwarrior is worth it.

It has saved me on no less than 3 different macs, so I always have a Diskwarrior CD in my Powerbook's Travel bag AND another version at home.

First take a deep breathe, repeat a few times.

stop using disk, and if you can get a spare drive of equal or greater size all the better.

download testdisk, TestDisk - CGSecurity
its open source, so free.

worked a treat for me, apparently it goes thru each sector and rebuilds the partition table.

Available for most platforms.

good luck

Thanks for all the help guys!

i'll try some of these and hopefully the outcome will be good!

Thanks heaps!

Most likely the master file records/master boot file or whatever its called for the drive has become corrupt. Data was probably being written to it when the pwoer was cut so the file records are incomplete, hence the Mac OS doesnt see anything. Data is still on the drive most likely, just the mac doesnt know where it is.

Disk repair utilities are your only hope. Recommend if you intend on using this drive again to do a full low level format, including the option to zero all data. That along with disk repairs would hopefully make the drive reliable again, however I would backup anything stored on it in the future.

I second that - its a great program...I've recovered quite a few customers photos with that after their SD cards have flaked out on them, even when places like Camera House and the like couldn't. And its free, too.