No file system found on external HD after accidental cord disconnection
Posted: 06 Aug 2019, 17:28
Hi all:
First, I'm generally a novice when it comes to computing beyond the basic, everyday use of Mac and Windows systems. Second, I don't have a lot of hope for recovering lost data ... but here goes my story anyway ...
I have an old laptop HD that I put in an enclosure a number of years ago and treated as my backup drive, mainly for years of digital camera images but also for other files and documents.
About three years ago, I was using the drive with my MacBook when the USB cord came undone from the end of the enclosure. Over time, I suppose the plug on the side of the enclosure became worn, and it is really loose these days. Unsurprisingly, when I went to reconnect and access the drive, it was no longer recognized/mounted by my Mac. This HD occasionally shows up in Disk Utility as a greyed-out drive, but sometimes it doesn't register there at all. Same goes for diskutil in Terminal. Typically, I get a pop-up window that says the drive cannot be read, and it gives me the option to initialize (does nothing), ignore or format.
When I run testdisk, the drive does show up every time. However, it appears there is no recognized file system.
When this all happened, I was able to run a number of data recovery programs on the drive (or on an image of it, perhaps) -- including photorec, Stellar products, and others -- and I did recover a fair bit of data, but many, many of the photos and videos could not be opened. The files are there, and those files are full of data (and are the expected size -- several megabytes for my photos and sometimes hundreds of megabytes for videos I'd taken), but they won't open as images/movies.
Recently, I started puttering around in Linux a bit -- not enough to really know what I'm doing, but I've learned a few commands here and there. I started thinking about my old drive and wondered about trying again, maybe this time in Linux, but otherwise on my Mac.
I expect that the drive is well and truly dead -- but there's plenty of data on it still, obviously, and short of taking it to a professional, I'm wondering if there's anything I can try, or if perhaps you all would be willing to look at some of the messages I get in testdisk/Terminal to help me understand what I'm faced with. I can post whatever info is needed here.
Thank you!
First, I'm generally a novice when it comes to computing beyond the basic, everyday use of Mac and Windows systems. Second, I don't have a lot of hope for recovering lost data ... but here goes my story anyway ...
I have an old laptop HD that I put in an enclosure a number of years ago and treated as my backup drive, mainly for years of digital camera images but also for other files and documents.
About three years ago, I was using the drive with my MacBook when the USB cord came undone from the end of the enclosure. Over time, I suppose the plug on the side of the enclosure became worn, and it is really loose these days. Unsurprisingly, when I went to reconnect and access the drive, it was no longer recognized/mounted by my Mac. This HD occasionally shows up in Disk Utility as a greyed-out drive, but sometimes it doesn't register there at all. Same goes for diskutil in Terminal. Typically, I get a pop-up window that says the drive cannot be read, and it gives me the option to initialize (does nothing), ignore or format.
When I run testdisk, the drive does show up every time. However, it appears there is no recognized file system.
When this all happened, I was able to run a number of data recovery programs on the drive (or on an image of it, perhaps) -- including photorec, Stellar products, and others -- and I did recover a fair bit of data, but many, many of the photos and videos could not be opened. The files are there, and those files are full of data (and are the expected size -- several megabytes for my photos and sometimes hundreds of megabytes for videos I'd taken), but they won't open as images/movies.
Recently, I started puttering around in Linux a bit -- not enough to really know what I'm doing, but I've learned a few commands here and there. I started thinking about my old drive and wondered about trying again, maybe this time in Linux, but otherwise on my Mac.
I expect that the drive is well and truly dead -- but there's plenty of data on it still, obviously, and short of taking it to a professional, I'm wondering if there's anything I can try, or if perhaps you all would be willing to look at some of the messages I get in testdisk/Terminal to help me understand what I'm faced with. I can post whatever info is needed here.
Thank you!