Data Recovery for Mac Help
Good morning to the community, I need technical help which I will now submit to you: I have a problem with an external mechanical hard disk which did not appear on the desktop after turning on the computer. Let me start by saying that I use a Mac with OS 13 and the 500 GB HD is for temporary storage and various downloads (I have no disk backup).
Last night before turning off the computer, as always, I ejected the various external HDs but I encountered a problem with the offending HD and the warning appeared that it had not been ejected correctly.
At this point I turned it off and the next morning the HD didn't appear even with the disk utility; after about 5 minutes it appears on the desktop. My fear that came true was that opening and saving some content was impossible. Before unplugging it I put my ear to the HD and I didn't hear any classic mechanical click-clack noise. Anyway I would opt for a logical breakdown, but I'm not sure of course.
So I thought about using one of the data recovery programs but it's a dilemma.

• EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac (Free > Recover 2GB data)
• Stellar data recovery (expensive)
• Disk drill (expensive - Recovery vault folder names are meaningless)


I'm not sure how to do it, also because it's not a good idea to experiment with recoveries...
Does anyone have experience and advice on this?
Thank you

 

The first thing I would do is get a copy of Tech tool run it on your drive and rebuild your Volume Structures.
I have had that sort of thing happen to me some times that has fixed it.
Also try mac disc utilities. If it is a bad disk there is not too much you can do with out spending a lot of money.
Good luck.

 

mechanical drives do not just "go bad" by turning off the computer or the drive. you do not even know that you lost data.

the "tech tool" you should be using is called Terminal.

 

I think the best user-friendly data recovery tool on Mac is Disk Drill. DM me for more info.

 

What is the best data recovery tool for recovering data that is not lost? Terminal. You need 0 additional software for this.

clone$ sudo whoami
root

clone$ cd /Volumes; ls
1TB Storage LaCie Macintosh SSD

clone$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/disk2s1 238Gi 175Gi 63Gi

clone$ diskutil list external
/dev/disk3 (external, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme

 

Someone asked this earlier this week, and I'm going to give the same advice, or copy pasta it:

"It sounds to me like possibly the partition map may have been corrupted.

This can happen when drives are not properly ejected or powered down and some other situations etc...

If it's an SSD, I would recommend always formatting it APFS regardless on M chipped Macs, although first lets see if we can save your date:

What I would do in this situation, hmm... I had something similar happen of late, and it was caused by a piece of software that failed to unmount the external drive (also was formatted HFS+/OS Extended Journaled etc) .. (mine was a HDD though)...

If you have access to a Windows or Linux machine, I would try and mount it on there (and no, you may not 'see' it there due to forma) but it will do some FSCK work and might fix the partition map easier then some other options I will lay out after.

Since you are new to Mac, I assume you don't have an Intel Mac around right? Because I would recommend Disk Warrior on that if so, but they don't have a version for silicon Mac or APFS drives (though it might work in Rosetta)...

I was able to resurrect the drive myself, and I think yours is probably fine too, ...

If you have the data backed up (you should obviously but I get people don't...and sometimes it's a hard lesson to learn...)

I would skip all that and go right to reformatting it, APFS (NOT HFS+ as it's an SSD), Guid, and perhaps do so TWICE or THRICE to make sure, and I would bet dollars to donuts it pops right back up... (albeit without your data)..."


But I don't think your data is gone, but some of it is probably going to be corrupted, or rather, recovered to the wrong place etc.

ALWAYS have backups.

 

I have had this exact same problem occur multiple times with my Lacie Rugged external USB-C drives with my macbook; because my 2 cpu Pro never hard crashes. the first thing to do is to reboot the machine a few times with the drive connected. You will eventually hear it spin up. Now you know the drive is physically working and has power supplied to it. The rest is simply mounting, unmounting commands. If you even need to do that. Mechanical drives are not like SSD where one day poof! and your stuff is gone.

This machine was booted down incorrectly. This is not going to re-write a parition table, or corrupt a mechanical drive. Those are scare-mongering warnings because they theoretically "can" and "have" happened.

You can even use Gparted or other unix partition/disk utilities. Same as linux. The @OP probably hasn't replied back yet because he is already busy making music.

 

Last edited: May 4, 2024

My drive never had a problem spinning up, and the cpu hadn't crashed... (and I'm going through a process of going over 40 HDD's/SSD's/etc of them right now...and collating legacy drives backed up thrice to some 18TB spinners etc.)

Part of my issue admittedly, was having a dock/enclosure that's bios/chip/sata to usb/etc was not up to the task, but this particular problem is not uncommon with every IT guy I speak to in terms of stuff showing up "blank" as in the other post I am referencing... and I admit here I copy pasta'd advice from perhaps a different source of problem, but I do think it's a little stupid on Apple's part to not let people know that there are background processes going on that they don't display and to advise people to have some patience. If Disk Utility fails, it doesn't mean there isn't something still going on within your OS. And still working on it. And sometimes these processes can take awhile.

It happened to me last week. So it's not theoretical, and I maintain proper drive hygiene (well, apparently, 'usually' ;)) , and hell, from a top level for most users, they don't even go there or allow or know what fsck is and let it to do it's job and patience and restarts etc.

And I know terminal and did everything you mentioned and whatnot... but in my case, I absolutely had invalid b-tree issues, and /sbin/fsck -fy and everything else wasn't doing it... and perhaps without conflating that with sloppy language on partition tables as mentioned in the previous comment, and the fact I absolutely agree with you that there are way too many companies offering snake oil solutions and "alternative facts" as to the problem, mine was that. Self inflicted perhaps. And perhaps occurred at an unlikely time with data being transferred to the device is still in the the disks "cache memory" before written properly. But I saw it happen, and search engines show it's not that uncommon, but most people who end up with the issue aren't doing the appropriate steps prior to going thermonuclear on it with wiping drives and buying stupid shit and whatnot.

I knew that my drive wasn't mechanically damaged.

And I knew it could be fixed. And I knew I didn't have to buy damn Disk Drill to do so.

And it's working just fine now.

 

There are no such things as "coincidence". He powered it down incorrectly, and the drive will magically return to life. It is an external, which makes it much less susceptible to any problems like this, because it is not a system drive. Nothing is "hiding but in use", like stuff does you have to check activity monitor to see. None of it is running anything. The first mistake you are making, is reading where he said he unmounted the drive and either a) believing he did that, because noone does, or b) believing he did it correctly. One of those two things did not occur.

Why would anyone buy Disk Drill for a 1 time use? That program and other utilities like it have been [k],[p],[kg],[kg/p] so many times it's not even funny. The last time I required assistance with a hard disk was when Backtrack 3 was using LiLo bootloader because b|t3 was written on Slackware. LiLo sucked. Grub is much less likely to have issues. Another thing on Slack that was not very great, was using the included Libparted partition utility, instead of Gparted or QTparted such as it was after first building on Ubuntu and then Debian for 4 and 5. Of course, after Kali was rolled out; no more problems.

 

Last edited: May 5, 2024

I'm not disagreeing with you clone.

sure, their drive might magically return to life, but not unless they have the patience, understanding, and know how to let that happen.

And yes, there are fsck processes happening that the user isn't aware of... that's why Apple, or their community etc, and whatnot advise to wait and let it do it's thing and be patient.

I'm saying that shit does happen. Maybe not congruent with the story here, or the story there, or whatever.. and shit happens on externals.

and I'm not making up what I have experienced within recent time. nor do I have a fundamental lack of understanding of how it works.

and perhaps with all the other jackass posts we see here regarding drives going south, and then advice given, and then no follow up from users with problems, I'm just gonna stop giving a shit or advice as why should I care if they don't?

 

Glad you got it working again and Don't let the b*stards get you down as we say on this little island! And don't stop caring because others fail to live up to your standards! Have a great weekend!

 

You shouldn't. But you should not dispense enormous walls of text at someone who is not even replying because their thing already started working again.

You shouldn't tell someone to format a disk. Ever. You also should never suggest anything about an SSD when the user clearly has a mechanical external. You should not recommend any data recovery software to an inexperienced user, ever. Especially not an SSD, because once TRIM is executed everything on the disk is gone. The answer is to disconnect the power and this is the only hope of any recovery. But, if you had read the initial post; you would have known it was not an SSD.

The symptom you should have noticed was when he mentioned booting and the drive becoming visible again in 5 minutes. It did not take 5 minutes, but it probably felt like 5 years to a dude in a panic about losing all his data. With no backup, of course. Did you ask how he installed MacOS 13? Did he use the Migration Tool or did he install it cleanly? Is the Mac an Intel, or a Apple Silicon? What OS did it initially ship with on it?

When you fix any computer, you do things systematically and methodically. You are guessing, and assuming things you cannot possibly know because none of those details are even supplied in anything he wrote! When you assume things like this, and the person trusts you and does what you tell them, they will blame you when you tell them to wipe their hard disks unnecessarily.

 

Good morning everyone, I apologize to those who kindly replied to me and have not yet received a response but this is because we have different time zones. Only now was I able to access the computer and connect.
In fact, I did not adequately integrate my configuration which I will now detail in greater detail: Mac studio M1 macOS 13.6.6 (initially Monterey). The OS installation was clean, from scratch. I have 4 other drives (including 2 SSDs) and they all have backups. As mentioned, the mechanical HD does not have BK, I would have liked to do it shortly saving the most significant things, I assure you and I am not kidding anyone, but you know well that sometimes bad luck sees clearly! I have been using Apple machines for over 30 years, and like many others I have a small and heavy cemetery of disks and something can be learned from this... ;-) nevertheless, as Clone rightly says, when there is a problem like this, I'm not saying that it goes to panic but, at least for me, you are never sure you are doing the right thing, or at least taking the most correct path. And I certainly don't have the in-depth technical knowledge as I read from your comments. I have read - with Google translation and therefore I ask you for patience - the various suggestions and I had read something with the procedure using the Terminal. What Clone suggested in a comment above, I have to decipher somehow because I didn't understand much of it.
Now I will reread the whole thing, copy some of the text and I think I will ask for further information...
Thanks again for your precious help
Roberto

 

I would like to point out that the Hard Disk has now been disconnected since the day before yesterday. As you say, I had rebooted and it seemed normal so without strange noises (it has power and is physically turned on).
I remember one detail: the evening before when I dismantled the various HDs, the one which for me is now in the condition of Schrödinger's cat (name: 500GB) did not "disappear" from the desktop. I tried again a few times, then turned off the Mac as usual. the next morning the HD did not appear. Unplugged a couple of times. Nothing.
After some time it appeared on the desktop.

P.S. Would I be the @OP? If yes, I'm not a beginner, I don't make music now because I'm tense and worried ;-)