Another crashed External

[Shinanagan]

Hey guys. Before I say anything, I want to thank all of you who help out on this site, answering questions from people like me. You guys help folks out everyday, and it's a practically thankless task, and just want to say I appreciate it.

Now the problem.

I had a LaCie that was about 5 or so years old that crashed on me. The bum deal was that every movie project I ever worked on was on there. Stupid me, I know. So I kept trying to get it to work but to no avail. Here's what I did.

1. Ran Disk Utility
-In running this, I would get the message:
Verify and Repair disk “disk3s6”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Catalog file entry not found for extent
Volume check failed.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


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

Attempted to repair and get the same message.

2. I ask a buddy of mine and he suggested I get an IDEE to USB bridge. I say cool. Get it, take the drive out of the casing, hook it up, and I get the same messages when running disk Utility. Fail.

3. So in searching through these other postings, everyone's ranting and raving about Disk Warrior. So I get DW4, hook my drive up through the IDEE to USB bridge and run it. And I noticed in a previous post on here that on the main page to hold down the option key and it will change to "Rebuild and Scavange". Cool. I do it.
Though when I run the program, I look down the report and in the "Disk Information", it says:

Files: 0
Folders: 0
Free Space: 111.77 GB
Format: Mac OS Extended (etc)

So if I understand correctly, it's basically telling me there's nothing on there, when I know that ain't the case.


....help.

[JDV]

Another tool which might be able to help is Data Rescue II (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/1133), which is also an excellent piece of recovery software for the Mac.

However, can you say more about your Disk Warrior experience? How long did it run? Disk Warrior can take a very long time to successfully run (a recent case discussed here took 56 hours to complete; that's extreme, but several hours is not at all unusual, and in scavenge mode it can really be quite a long time). I just want to be sure that Disk Warrior had actually completed when you saw the lines you posted to us.

That it seems to see the drive and its format is a hopeful sign; at least the drive seems to be functioning. I'm not sure what advantage is to be gained by using the IDEE to USB bridge for this process. You might be better eliminating any intermediary hardware which makes the setup more complex, unless there was some special reason that you and your friend thought this might be helpful. It isn't too unusual for Disk Utility to be unable to repair some problems on disks (though often enough it can, of course), which is why a product like Disk Warrior exists at all. It can normally repair file system damage that Disk Utility cannot.

As a last-ditch option, if the data is critically important to you, there are a number of data recovery companies that can almost certainly recover most if not all of your data, but these services are fairly expensive, so it is worth trying these other programs first and hope for the best. Good luck!

Joe VanZandt