corrupted external harddrive

M

McCloud

Member
Hey guys,

here's the thing - for some reason, my external hard disk that I am using primarily with Mac got corrupted and is no longer readable... by Mac or by Windows.

In Mac, I can still see ALL the files from the past with a recovery SW like M3 Data Recovery. I can't afford to pay the license however, so I plugged it into my old Windows laptop, where I had some good recovery software.. but here, not even the software can read the disk at all.

How would you best approach the situation ? Basically, my goal is to recover the data through the Windows laptop and not the Mac - since there are no free recovery programs for Mac that would do the job easily.

Thanks!
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
If it's a mac file system (HFS) Windows wouldn't be able to read it normally I believe. You could try https://sourceforge.net/projects/catacombae/ which is a set of free tools that can apparently read HFS formatted drives in Windows.

I assume you only have one copy of the data, hence why you're trying to recover it. This being the case, you may want to clone the drive and try recovering files from the clone. You could use something like http://clonezilla.org/ or http://redobackup.org/

While I imagine you may have come to this conclusion already, I'll say it anyway - always backup your data. Never keep just one copy of your data if it's data you're going to miss when the drive has a problem.
 
M

McCloud

Member
thanks.
Ye, I did try that one out without any luck..

I can still try the cloning thing.. maybe it'll work.
 
T

Tony1044

Prolific Poster
If the drive was readable in both Mac and Windows then it is most likely formatted FAT32 or exFAT32.

If it was only ever readable by Mac then most likely HFS as mentioned above. If that was the case then don't try Windows tools for recovery.

Some free software does seem to be available:

http://www.easeus.com/mac-data-recovery-software/drw-mac-free.htm
https://www.cleverfiles.com/mac-data-recovery.html

I've used products from Easeus before and they seem ok. Never on a Mac though. Never heard of cleverfiles before.
 
M

McCloud

Member
So the end result is..

I've managed to run CloneZilla and clone the disk.. unfortunately it was also not readable.

But for some reason, one of the Recovery programs on Windows did detect the backup (external) hard disk after all... and found a bunch of files.

Although not as specific and precise as the M3 Data recovery I've tried on Mac, I did recover some files... but wasn't able to open them afterwards.

Why is this ?
If I were to pay big money for a professional recovery service, how do they go about it ?
I thought they're also using just recovery software...
 
T

Tony1044

Prolific Poster
Depends. I visited one of them many moons ago and they actually took the HDD apart and put the platters into special machines which read the raw data from the platters - obviously this was done in a clean room environment.

From there, they used their own very proprietary and secret software to rebuild the data that they could.

Honestly these days I have no idea.

The problem you have now is you have run so many recovery apps in both environments you've quite possibly damaged what's there beyond all recovery.

Why were the recovered files unreadable? Hard to tell - the NTFS table or whatever the HPFS equivalent is may have been written to by recovery software to try and make the data readable, is one guess.
 
M

McCloud

Member
Tony1044 said:
Depends. I visited one of them many moons ago and they actually took the HDD apart and put the platters into special machines which read the raw data from the platters - obviously this was done in a clean room environment.

From there, they used their own very proprietary and secret software to rebuild the data that they could.

Honestly these days I have no idea.

The problem you have now is you have run so many recovery apps in both environments you've quite possibly damaged what's there beyond all recovery.

Why were the recovered files unreadable? Hard to tell - the NTFS table or whatever the HPFS equivalent is may have been written to by recovery software to try and make the data readable, is one guess.
Click to expand...

ah, I see. Thanks!
So the recovery software is actually altering the drive being recovered ?
 
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