I am using Tiger on a 1.5 G4 PowerBook. The external drive (WD 200GB) is in an ice cube enclosure running the Oxford chipset.

It has been working fine under Tiger and is partitioned into two drives - one for storing Final Cut Express and iDVD files, one for storing pictures.

Last night I copied an iMovie file across to it and an iDVD file. I shut the computer down - but not the external drive.

When I woke up this morning I switched on the computer and the drive refused to mount. Just gave me a message that it wasn't recognised and would I like to initialize it.

I tried hooking the external drive up to three different Macs and even took it out of the case and put it into my PowerMac on the IDE bus - still the same.

So I tried running Disk Warrior on it - it won't work as it says it is an unsupported format.

Disk Warrior and Disk Utility both recognise it as a 200GB drive - but only are seeing 1 partition.

I am wondering if the partition map is damaged (Disk Warrior says that it can not fix this).

Does anyone know what I can do to recover the data?

Thanks,

Chris

Chris
If DW/DU 'see' the drive, but cannot mount it, it sounds as if your HDD driver is kaput rather than the partition map, or maybe as well as the partition map. You now need a disk repair utility such as LaCie's Silverlining (v 6.5.4 currently) or InTech's Hard Disk SpeedTools for OS X (and there are others, eg, ExpressPro-Tools from ATTO, and even the freeware Mt Everything (http://www.overnet.de/hhp/mte/). All of these can restore the Apple-specified partion map and re-install a driver. However, pray that it is only the driver that has departed for the setting sun. HDST can return more detailed information, but it costs (about USD90), whereas Silverlining comes free with any LaCie external drive (magnetic or optical). Mt Everything is highly regarded, but is SCSI only.

Order@speedtools.com
http://www.intechusa.com/ (Have your credit card handy. Download only, but boxware is available, in pictures if not in fact.)

support.au@lacie.com
http://www.lacie.com/au/support/drivers/

I realize that you have a WD drive, but I have no knowledge of the supportware for the drive. Both Silverlining (very probably) and HDST (almost certainly) are capable of 'taking over' the drive and installing their own drivers if you have nothing of the kind from WD. You may/may not need also to install firmware or a firmware update in either case.

However, your first port of call may wisely be here: http://support.wdc.com/techinfo/index.asp

Thank you so much for your helpful reply.

After I posted I tried some more searching and came across a programme called Data Rescue X.

It focuses on data recovery, rather than disk repair. I ran a scan last night and it seems to have found all the files. I have to now pay for it as the demo only allows transfer of one file.

However, I don't mind paying as it seems to have rescued all my files. I think it is about $60 US.

It definitely related to the partitions as the programme has a function to ignore partitions and suddenly it was able to see the drive. Apparently this type of thing is pretty rare and so not many of the disk repair programmes can tackle it.

I will repost once I have attempted the transfer and let you all know how it went.

Having a regular backup procedure would have saved that $60...

Well - having 30GB video files makes it hard to back up sometimes as I really need another hard drive.

I already have three.

Thanks for your help anyway.

Well the results

- Nearly all my photos were saved (backed up anyway except for the last couple of weeks).

- Video files look like they are corrupted beyond repair

I do have the completed DVD projects on DVD so the result is not too bad.

The video files were stored on a seperate partition to the photos - maybe that was where the problem lay?

Cheers,

Chris

We have a back up article on the forum.

Here