Hi Trevor,

I had the drive removed from its casing and connected to a drive dock to test it and was told the drive is definitly bad. From what I was told once its clear the drive is the problem Disk Warrior is no longer a useful option. Two different techs told me this but I really dont know. I just know it looks like my only option is to pay the $800 for data recovery.

$800 is not a lot for failure recovery, when I send customers to DriveSavers I see quotes often for $1500 minimum.

Assuming the techs are telling you correctly that the disk is damaged, then they would most likely be right. Programs like diskwarrior can do a lot of good with logically damaged data, but not much good if the drive is physically bad, as is probably the case (based on contextual information in this thread alone).

If you typically use your external drive as extra storage more than storing copies of what's on your mac's drive, you should probably buy 2 external drives and use one to backup the other. A good backup is one that is not plugged into anything when it's not being used to make backups.

Removing the drive from it's case and connecting it to their drive dock will tell you that the problem is in your hard drive and not in your case.

But (by itself) that will not tell you if the problem is a hardware problem, or a messed-up filesystem.

If you have a messed-up filesystem, then DiskWarrior is very likely to be able to fix it. If you have a hardware problem, then DiskWarrior has a low to medium chance of being able to fix it (with some specific types of hardware problems).

I'm not sure if the techs did any other tests other than swapping the internal drive into a drive dock, but if that's all they did it is definitely not proof that you need to take the drive to a data recovery service.

If that's what you want to do, go ahead. I'd personally try DiskWarrior first.

Trevor

It is also possible to extract the raw disk data from the failing hardware (sometimes aided by trick such as putting the drive in the freezer) as a raw disk image (e.g. using command-line programs like 'dd' or 'ddrescue') that you store on another drive and then repair that disk image using DiskWarrior.
I did that to rescue some inadvertently non-backed up data from an iBook drive that had failed to the squealing and clicking stage.

Thanks Trevor and Hayne for the info and suggestions. Unfortunate that the techs at the shops don't offer the kind of support you do. I was also told running Disk Warrior could mess things up even more which scared me out of continuing to try and fix it myself. Not only that, but to my disbelief when i took the external drive in with my macbook somehow my macbook started to fail right when the store tech turned it on! It wouldnt start up then when it did it was running some code on a black screen prompt over and over. They did some tests on my macbook and discovered the firewire port wasnt working and im not sure what else was wrong but to find out they would have to send it to the "depot". At that point I was so freaked out and confused I let them send it for a flat rate of $350 to fix it plus another $100 to back it up to a drive. Ive left the external drive with them but havnt given the go ahead on the data reco from that drive yet, though iguess i cant really run disk warrior till i get my macbook back from repair. What a nightmare this has all been.

No, DiskWarrior will not mess things up even more. Whomever said that doesn't know anything about DiskWarrior.

The way DiskWarrior works is that it only reads data off of your drive while it is figuring out whether or not it can do any good. Once it has completed reading and figuring, it will let you know whether or not it can replace your directory (which will fix the problems) or not. If it can indeed replace your directory, it asks you first, and if you give it the go ahead, it replaces the directory all in one fell swoop. This is the only time it writes to your drive--after it knows that it can fix it, and you've given it permission.

It sounds like these techs are confusing DiskWarrior with other repair programs that are continously reading and writing to the disk in an attempt to fix it. If a problem occurs during writing, these other apps can cause more damage than they fix.

DiskWarrior is really an excellent program that I highly recommend. You should feel completely comfortable trying to use it on your hard drive.

Whether it will fix your hard drive or not is still unclear, but it is safe to attempt it.

Trevor

Need some help with this too! Just happened and i need to access my files.

Anyone there?

I have a lacie external drive, the one with swappable drives.. First time i have problems with it.

"disk insertion.....The disc you inserted was not readable by this computer"

I see the drives in the disk utility but they won't mount.
Would appreciate any comments and instructions.

Thank you!

Allanz,

Try what Trevor suggests above. Ultimately I had to pay for data recovery but hopefully you'll have luck trying other things suggested first.

Best of luck to you!

- erin