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TICKET ARCHIVE -> External Hard Drive Not Showing up

gofraxinus - Feb 26, 2008 - 2:21 pm

We have an external hard drive (Lacie 250gb USB by designer f.a. porsche). Today while working, I had the following apps open (photoshop cs, itunes, safari, vectorworks, and illustrator.) all of the apps are located on the computer, except illustrator, which is only accessible through the external. The power went out (i know, should have been on back up!) and upon it coming back on again, LaCie (the hard drive) was not accessible. I restarted, tried another usb port, unplugged, sat, waited, etc. Finally we plugged it in another mac (we are both on mac osx 10.4, the computer that was running the hd when the power failure happened is a g5, the other computer tried is a macbook pro g4.) and let it sit for about an hour. Never showed up. Called tech support for LaCie. The tech guided me through disk utitlity in which i get the following error messages:

Verify and Repair disk “LACIE”
** /dev/disk3s1
** Phase 1 - Read FAT
Unable to read FAT (Input/output error)
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


1 non HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error


LaCie shows up in the left of disk utility but she is grey while the other hd's are black.

the tech said that there is a partition failure, and that we needed to download data rescue ii. Well, i did and i have not ran it yet because I don't know the password to install programs to the G5, and the other computer is working (we're screen printers). I am just wondering is there any way to recover the data another way, and definitely not losing it through formatting or reformatting? This is so very important to me I am lost on what to do.
I hope I gave enough info...

ScottW - Feb 26, 2008 - 3:26 pm

You need to purchase Disk Warrior first. This is the best way to resurrect your drive without going through a lengthy process. Disk Warrior is a godsend and works in these cases 99% of the time.

If Disk Warrior doesn't do it, then you could be left with the scenario given to you by LaCie, and that means running a bit-by-bit recovery of the drive, and that data recovered would need to be stored somewhere else, on another drive. This will be a time consuming process if it comes to this and will not be fun. You may not get back 100% of the data, but a good chance you will get back what you need hopefully.

But, Disk Warrior more than likely will be your friend.

http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/


Scott

gofraxinus - Feb 28, 2008 - 8:16 am

Hey, Thanks so much for that. We are going to try diskWarrior today and I will let you know what happens! Thanks for the recommendation!

gofraxinus - Feb 28, 2008 - 9:13 am

HELP!!
When we tried diskwarrior we got the following error:

Directory cannot be rebuilt, the file system is unsupported.

-this disk is not a macintosh disk.

-This diak does not appear on the desktop

-This disk is 232.88 gb in size.

Advanced:
-disk id: disk2s1
-sectors: 488,392,002 (512 bytes each)
-drive format: Fdisk partition scheme
-file system: windows/pc
Model-LaCie hard drive USB


this is a multi-platform hd.
it runs on both pc and mac.
was formatted for mac though.
sooo....what now?
:\

gofraxinus - Feb 29, 2008 - 9:56 am

Thanks anyway!