Help with a corrupted hard drive?

[larrytetris]

Hey y'all.

I have a corrupted 1TB Western Digital My Passport external hard drive. It was corrupted when I plugged it into a Mac, and now can no longer be read on either a PC or a Mac. I don't believe it was designed to be readable on a Mac, and it consequently was damaged.

Anyone know any solutions?

[Antifate]

This seems like one of those situations that requires a professional. I think such things are a little costly--but then again, 1TB is a lot of stuff.

[insatiate]

You need to determine if it's a hardware failure or not.

You just plugged it in? Didn't do anything? Or did it say something like "derp i dont know what this is u wan me format?"

If say, the partition table got overwritten or destroyed somehow you can probably recover most or all of the data.

Does the drive show up in your disk management console?

[t0x]

any specific error messages?

what do the preferences of the harddrive say? which format?
still NTFS?

have u tried opening it with some linux? (obv other than mac..)

also, maybe this stuff here can help you:

commercial:
- http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/index.html
- http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/


opensource:

- https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24481/ntfs-3g + http://osxfuse.github.io/ ( i think u need to install both)

[insatiate]

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

..but I recommend answering questions first

[Wojtek]

if you did something stupid like overwrote partition table, this program can get it fixed in semi-automatic way:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
however i do not recommend this program if you don't know what are you doing.

[larrytetris]

if you did something stupid like overwrote partition table, this program can get it fixed in semi-automatic way:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Nope I don't think I did anything of the sort manually. It just stopped working after being plugged into the Mac.
[!--quoteo--][div class=\\\'quotetop\\\']QUOTE[/div][div class=\\\'quotemain\\\'][!--quotec--]
however i do not recommend this program if you don't know what are you doing.
[/quote]
This is also true.

You need to determine if it's a hardware failure or not.

You just plugged it in? Didn't do anything? Or did it say something like "derp i dont know what this is u wan me format?"

It showed that the computer identified new hardware (even though I've used it before on this computer before it was corrupted) but then failed to open it. It doesn't show up on My Computer.

[!--quoteo--][div class=\\\'quotetop\\\']QUOTE[/div][div class=\\\'quotemain\\\'][!--quotec--]
If say, the partition table got overwritten or destroyed somehow you can probably recover most or all of the data.

Does the drive show up in your disk management console?
[/quote]
Have not checked. Will check when I get home from work or this weekend.

any specific error messages?

Sometimes a dialog box appears, but not all the time. I'm not sure if it matters if I'm plugging into a USB 2.0 or 3.0 port.

[!--quoteo--][div class=\\\'quotetop\\\']QUOTE[/div][div class=\\\'quotemain\\\'][!--quotec--]
what do the preferences of the harddrive say? which format?
still NTFS?
[/quote] Don't know, where do I find this?

[!--quoteo--][div class=\\\'quotetop\\\']QUOTE[/div][div class=\\\'quotemain\\\'][!--quotec--]
have u tried opening it with some linux? (obv other than mac..)
[/quote] Nope. I'll try it if the other suggestions don't work. I think my roommate runs Ubuntu.

[Blink]

Nope. I'll try it if the other suggestions don't work. I think my roommate runs Ubuntu.

You can also run Linux directly off a CD/Flash drive.

Like someone mentioned before, check if it shows up in disk management and what its status is.  Do you remember if it asked you if you wanted to "initialize" the disk when you plugged it into the mac?

[DarthDuck]

If it comes down to needing professional assistance and the data is that important to you, then my boss recommended outsourcing the digital forensics to China. He said he has done that a dozen times to recover data, and they always send back the entire recovered hard drive (physically or virtually), or at the very least send its data back.