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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Ext Firewire Unreadable After OS X 10.4.6

raylazarine - Apr 7, 2006 - 10:07 pm

I have just completed the download and upgrade of 10.4.6, and I can no longer view the data files on my external Maxtor firewire drive. If I run the OS X disk utility, the utility reports that the drive is now an MS-DOS FAT32 partition. The utility still shows that there is ~120Gb of data on the drive, with ~ 30Gb of free space. However, I cannot read or see the data files. I have previously successfully downloaded several Mac OS X 10.x updates, and have not experienced this problem.
Is it possible for me to recover my data files?

ishan - Apr 8, 2006 - 11:22 am

Unfortunately, this is an all too common problem, and Apple now recommends disconnecting all FW drives during system updates-but that doesn't help you much. First, I would hook up the FW drive to another Macintosh to see if it will mount. If it does, copy everything off the drive ASAP. If it doesn't work, then use DiskWarrior to see if you can repair the drive (it's aobut $80 and worth every penny). If that doesn't work, buy Data Rescue II which does what it's name implies. Finally, you could try connecting the FW drive to a Windows PC with a FW port (if it truly is now a FAT32 formatted drive, which is hard to believe). The files should be readable and you can copy them to a flash drive, CD, DVD, etc.

HTH and please let us know what happens. Thanks.

raylazarine - Apr 9, 2006 - 11:24 am

Hi Ishan,

Thanks for your suggestions. I first attached the drive to another Mac OS X machine, unfortunately that was met w/ the same results. I next tried to mount the drive to a Windows machine ... Windows recognized that the drive was attached, but was unable to recognize the partition. I then went online to determine whether I should try Disk Warrior or Data Rescue II. A nice feature that Data Rescue makes available, is that they allow you to first download a demo, to determine whether or not Data Rescue II can see the lost files. The demo was able to find my lost files, so I purchased a serial number to activate the demo ($99US). I have now been able to recover all of the files that I had stored on my Maxtor.

Thanks again for your great help!
Ray Lazarine

ishan - Apr 9, 2006 - 12:22 pm

Glad things worked out for the best. You might want to buy DiskWarrior also-depending on your budget-because it really does do a fantastic job of rebuilding directory corruption.