Ticket Options

Question Profile

Question Details

TICKET ARCHIVE -> External hard drive will not mount

GAMMATOLA - Jan 7, 2008 - 2:02 pm

My problem is this:

I have a 250 GB Lacie external firewire drive connected to my PowerBook G4. Drive is less than 2 years old and has always worked fine until now. Drive will not mount to desktop, but does show up in OS X Disk Utility App.

When I try to verify the Lacie disk, I get the following error message:

Verifying volume “LACIE”
** /dev/disk2s1
** Phase 1 - Read FAT
Unable to read FAT (Input/output error)
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


1 non HFS volume checked
Volume needs repair


I have about 144 GB of VERY important information on this drive and must get this Data. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Serenak - Jan 8, 2008 - 7:48 am

Hello Chris

thanks for coming to MacOSX.com and I will try my best to assist you.

Well I am afraid you are in a bit of a bind...

Your external is formatted in the standard PC FAT (File Allocation Table) which is fine as Mac can read FAT perfectly well, unfortunately when things go wrong FAT can get you into trouble because Mac disk utilities are usually built to fix HFS+ (Apple Extended) format disks.

Normally I recommend DiskWarrior in a case like this but only recently in a very similar situation to yours a client found DW useless because... the HDD was FAT formatted. (That is why when I get any HDD for my Mac I format it myself to HFS+ unless there is good reason to do otherwise, such as it being a shared pocket drive or something)

I can only really offer you a couple of pieces of advice:

First if you can in any ways shape or form make a dupe of the drive attempt to do so before doing anything else... (Carbon Copy Cloner is the best bet free from here http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html)

Second download the DataRescue II demo from here http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue_info.php and see if that can see anything rescuable on the drive... if it can and you think it is worth the $99 then buy it and a new HDD to recover your data to.

The only other option is to connect the drive to a Windows PC and hope that that has more luck mounting the drive and possibly clone it from there using this excellent free Windows tool http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

Unfortunately based on this short thread http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...40913013304988 if Disk Utility didn't help then possibly not much else will help.

I am taking it from the desperation of your plea that you don't have any back ups?

I am sorry to say that the outlook isn't great at the moment the DataRescueII is very much looking like the only really viable chance.

Sorry I can't help more or be more positive - I am not having a dig here (and it is not any help to you right now) but in future make sure you have a backup strategy for important data, and keep Mac HDDs in HFS+ when possible, it makes dealing with this sort of thing easier.

GAMMATOLA - Jan 9, 2008 - 1:02 pm

Thanks so much for your response, Serenak. In the meantime, I have been able to run Data Rescue II on the disk and many files are showing up as being recoverable. Unfortunately, the original file structures have been abandoned, which presents a nightmare when it comes to organizing these recovered files. The company I work for has offered to send the disk out for recovery, so I'm not sure if I should abandon trying to recover these files or not. Will it damage the disk if I recover these files AND send it out to a professional? Thanks again. Chris

GAMMATOLA - Jan 9, 2008 - 2:04 pm

Another thing that's funny - there was 144 GB of data on the drive. Data Rescue has been able to locate 96 GB of data. Where would the remaining 50 GB be?

GAMMATOLA - Jan 9, 2008 - 2:45 pm

Serenak - Jan 9, 2008 - 3:30 pm

Hello Chris

If you check the Data Rescue info on the website it says that it makes no changes to the disk at all, it simply nondestructively scours the disk for recoverable data - so there should be no risk in using it before sending it to a professional data recovery firm... (and be glad you are not footing the bill for that, it can run to $000s!) However if you want to be 100% sure get the recovery company to give you a green light to try that first before doing it.

As to the missing 50GB, well you got an I/O error, which usually means a bad sector or other "hard" damage to the disk... so it is possible that the 50GB is in an area of the disk DRII cannot read successfully (though the professional recovery teams may be able to using very sophisticated clean room "magnetic memory" techniques as long as these areas are not totally destroyed...

So my advice is ask them if it is OK to use DRII and if they say "yes" salvage what you can that way and then ship it to them and hope they can recover the rest. Lost structure is a pain, but a lot less than losing the data totally.

Good luck and it looks like all may not be lost - consider the investment in a backup drive or NAS a very high priority for the future... a few hundred dollars for peace of mind is a small price to pay (and you can get perfectly good backup software free... you LaCie probably even came with the excellent SilverKeeper which I personally rely on and if not you can download it free from the LaCie website. (Also take a look at the excellent SuperDuper!)

If you need anything more please ask...

GAMMATOLA - Jan 10, 2008 - 10:35 am

Thanks again for all your help. I'm sending the disk out to a professional recovery team. Cheers!