Hard Drive recovery software!

[owaters]

I have just turned on my external firewire hard drive and up pops a message saying that its has failed varification and as a result will not mount.

The data I have on these is irreplaceable, I really need it back!

Disk Utility can see it but can't do anything with it, Norton Utilities can't even see it....

Help!

[edX]

DiskWarrior at www.alsoft.com

it runs from os 9 only at this point. it should recognise and repair your FW drive by first launching diskwarrior and then plugging the drive in and rebuilding the directories. it has brought my 80 gb FW HD back from non recognition twice now. they are suppossed to have an os x version out soon. it should have been out already but they are a little behind schedule.

[Urbansory]

Norton Systemworks works for me

[edX]

Norton Utilities can't even see it....

well, apparently it doesn't for him.

[owaters]

Thanks for that edX, haven't tried it yet.

I have just started up in OS9 and my firewire drive has mounted, working fine and dandy! This means it's just OSX which can't mount it.

Any ideas on how to repair the OSX side of things from OS9?

[edX]

that's exactly the behavior i had the first time i encountered this problem. i spent 3 days trying every disk repair app i had. no luck. untill diskwarrior was suggested and i tried it. i figured even if it didn't work, you can never have too many repair apps. but it did and within a half hour it was back up.

another hint - don't just try and repair your non appearing disk. often the recognition problem is in the main drive and system. so try repairing it as well. you might have to run repairs on both to get it to work. i've also heard people with similar problems report results after running repairs on both 2-3 times each.

if a repair app is compatible with os x, it doesn't make a difference whether it runs from os 9 or os x. if your norton will launch from os 9, you might try it from there. at the moment techtool pro and diskwarrior are the 2 best repair apps and both only run in a boot from os 9. both have os x versions on the way. i have both and all i can say is that diskwarrior fixed this for me when no others would.

[owaters]

Managed to sort it without any disk repair/recovery tools!
I just started up in OS9 and the disk appeared, then rebooted back to OSX and bingo!

Strange....

Thanks for all the info though

[edX]

well, glad it all worked out. of course one trick that i use sometimes when a drive is recognised on boot is to simply unplug it and plug it back in. this works 99% of the time. i've been told this is because of older chips in my drives that confuse the system at startup.