OS X :: Recovering All Files From External Hard Drive
Jul 27, 2009
just a few minutes ago, i decided to install leopard on my mac. So i cloned my old install onto my external hard drive using carbon copy cloner. once that was done and verified that it was good, i inserted my leopard dvd and installed: erasing my os x install...now i booted up and was messing in disk utility and erased my external hard drive...i thot it was the other one i had plugged in for time machine! i just lost all my important files, including my itunes library, and everything else that i really need!!
I went to make a copy of an important drive and accidentally re-formatted it (re-formatted mac journaled, originally mac journaled). The drive contained a bunch of important disk image files which I need to retrieve whole. I'm fairly confident that the files are still there and only the table information got overwritten, as the re-format took about 30 seconds. None of the recovery software I've seen however, can retrieve .dmg files, or such large files (these are up to 32 gb each in size).how I can retrieve these disk image files?
I recently upgraded to snow leopard because i needed to install logic pro and I decided to format the hard drive, I did my back up but there was to much music on it so I did a couple of dvd's just for the music I compressed them (.zip) with stuffit one of them did work but the other one where it has all of Itunes library doesn't unzip. I wonder if I can recover it from time machine?
I had a PC before I had a MAC, and I started using my external hard drive (a FAT32 drive) with my MAC using NTFS-3g. Now my hard drive has stopped working - it is recognised by my mac although no files show up, and it is not recognised in the PCs I've tried it in, and seems to crash them. I tried DiskWarrior to recover the data, but it only works in NTFS. I am looking for a way to try and fix the drive and retrieve the data using a mac rather than a PC.
My hard drive on my iMac died. However, I saved my music on my back-up Seagate Drive. Now my iMac has a nice new drive and a freshly downloaded copy of iTunes. I found the music on the back-up drive. So far, so good. Now, all I gotta do is get the music files from the back-up to iTunes.So:
(a) How do I do that, since my efforts so far have been unsuccessful.
(b) Can I assume all my original lists and albums are kaput and will have to be recreated and reorganized?
(c) When I sync my iPod to the new library, can I assume it will scramble my existing iPod configuration to meet the new lists and album configuration?
My macbook refuses to boot and freezes with either the blue or grey screen of death. I took my computer to the Genius Bar and the guy said my drive was dead but said I could possibly recover some of my files with an external hard drive. How exactly would I go about doing this? I've searched through posts but haven't really found anything specific. Do I go through Disk Utility or do I need a third party program like Data Rescue? He said to just boot from an external drive and then browse my old hard drive (which does show up in Disk Utility) and move things over.
My 500GB external hard drive (Hitachi DeskStar) crashed! The blue light comes on, and I can hear the hard drive spinning, then sounds like it's stuck, or clicking ...
Same thing happens to the internal HD on my iBook G4. Sometimes the internal HD works, sometimes not.
I desparately need to find someway to attempt to either fix the external 500GB HD, or recover the files. The 500GB was my main HD, and I have so much very important data that I need to recover (no backups!).
I have years of research (lots of family history), thousands of pictures (many very old), my personal journals that I've been keeping for years, personal information, letters, documents, family videos, and all of my e-mail.
Somebody was telling me that there is special software that will recognize the HD, and allow you to recover the files.
What would you recommend? At the present I have no money to do anything, but will save up for the recovery software. My uncle is getting me a new hard drive, so I'll have that to back up the files when I have the recovery software ...
If my hard drive was "scrubbed" by techs at the genius bar who thought that my computer had a software issue (it didn't) does that mean that a data recovery tool wouldn't be able to find the deleted files?
I recently killed my PC laptop by spilling liquid on it. It died instantly. I replaced it with a Macbook, which I love, but all my iTunes music files and photos were on the hard drive in the PC laptop. Is any of that information recoverable and capable of being added to my Macbook?
The USB flash drive is Sandisk, 4GB, formatted for Mac. It became corrupted and I don't have access to stored files. The messages on screen is that disk can not be read and invitation to reformat it. I found special software for recovering files from corrupted drives but it is not affordable for a student like me. I've tried to find in forums and word of mouth some shareware/freeware working on Mac OS 10.3.9 but all I got is programs that take space on HD and do nothing, that is, software that is about selling and marketing stuff, not the real thing. Tried with 3 different such a programs, sheer time wasting. I found that this area is pretty much absolutely dark. Do experienced fellow mac users know about some truly working shareware/freeware that can help me retrieve the files from this corrupted Sandisk USB flash drive?
Data Rescue II was recommended to me recently to retrieve erased files from an external 1TB hard drive, where the files were accidentally erased whilst initializing another (now discovered as a faulty) external hard drive. I was led to believe by the sales person that the lost data could be recovered completely with no change, but now since using the software it seems this is not the case. As recommended, I scanned the drive using the scan specifically for deleted files, proceeded with the recovery (happy to see it had recovered all of the expected files, plus more) but then discovered that none of the files had their original file name (everything is now renamed with numbers relating to the file, and the file type). I have tried calling ProSoft several times now during their opening hours, and sent several emails to enquire further about the recovery process, but never receive an answer.
It would be great if anyone here has had a similar/same problem or knows if there is a way of retrieving the lost files with original file names intact. I fear that this software has left me with no choice but to open each file and rename individually, which is sure to be an epic task for the amount of files that were on the drive!
My hard drive crashed and could not be recovered without spending about $1500. (according to the guys at the local Apple certified store) We had quite a bit of music on it but not enough to justify spending that kind of money. Is there a record of the music we purchased and some way to re-download that music to our new hard drive without re-buying all of it?
I did a search for this problem but all the solutions seemed to involve using your iPod or old hard drive to recover. I recently had two tragedies in a short period of time. First, my iPod broke - a tragedy, but one I could get past. The second was the horrible death of my laptop's hard drive. I had some backups of important school and work related files, as well as a few other things like old tax documents, and much of my older files, but I did not have my iTunes folders backed up, because I was under the impression that I could download these songs again through iTunes should the need arise, since I had purchased them in the past.
Now, on my new computer, I have downloaded iTunes, and have been trying to recover my old songs. I authorized this computer, but when I "check for available downloads" it says everything has been downloaded, and that I should try to transfer the songs from the other computer. This is of course, impossible at this point. I can still see my purchases in my history, and if I try to purchase a song I had before, it warns me that this will create a duplicate. Will I have to purchase these songs again? I can see how I should have backed up my music, but I thought that iTunes would allow me to acquire them again.
My friend wanted some files to be transferred to his external hard drive from my Mac. As he is a Windows user, I guess his hard drive is formatted for Windows as well. As I plug in the hard disk in my Mac, I can't transfer the files. It says something like "the disk cannot be modified". So, please help me on how can I transfer this files from my Mac and if I do format it to work with the Mac, will it work for Windows later?
I have an external usb hdd attached to my mini. I was able to network with my new macbook easily, but I couldnt find any way to access the external drive. I have all my music on that external hdd, and want to be able to stream that to the new macbook.
Basically I have an iMac and a Macbook Pro (unibody) and a USB external hard drive (500GB) I want to wirelessly back up my Macbook Pro and the iMac with the hard drive connected to the iMac. A sort of time capsule concept. But i don't have an airport base station to make this process easier I only have a wanadoo livebox.
I have an external hard drive that I use as my "back-up" of old jobs. I then burn my jobs to a dvd and then delete the files I burned. Is it possible to just delete the files from the external hd and not my computer?
A while back I removed a Apple Hard Drive after I thought I had shut down the computer. Instead, it had just slept and so still had the power on. This caused the file system in the hard drive to fail, so I erased and rebuilt the file system on the Hard Drive. It worked fine for another day, and then failed. When I went to see if I could fix it, Disk Utility said the S.M.A.R.T status had failed and the send the hard drive to an apple specialist. Is there any way I could fix the Hard Drive myself?
We have a 320gb external hard drive formatted in FAT32 so both the macbook and our windows computer could use the drive. We copied 5 gigs of music to the hard drive to view on the Windows computer. The computer recognizes the drive and shows that 5 gigs are being used but I cant see any of the files.
I am trying to use my hard drive I have had for a couple years to back up some files on my computer, but the data I had stored on there already has disappeared. I previously had the hard drive connected to the Time Machine application, but have not used it in over a year when I received an error message trying to backup my computer using that application.
I know the data I already had on there is still on the hard drive because nearly half of the space on the drive is used up, but when I plug the hard drive in to my computer and open it there are no files to be found. I want to back up the current files on my computer, but I don't want to risk losing what I already had on the hard drive, so is there any way I can find and access the old files again?
I'll include my hardware information on here in case that helps to find a solution: 2006 MacBook Pro 15" Intel Core Duo Mac OS X 10.5.8 1TB Western Digital My Book: Studio Edition II Dual-drive Storage System with RAID
I have a Macbook Pro 13.3" running 10.6.4. I've had this computer for a year now and I have always wondered. Can my 500 GB Toshiba Hard Drive be used for Time Machine and for storing files at the same time?
I've heard about partitioning it, but will that delete the files on there? I dont have enough space on my hard drive to backup my external HD.
I had just purchased a Lacie 500GB xternal drive for my G5, I also have another xternal drive hooked up which is a Western Digital. I copied everything , music video files ect... onto the Lacie drive to clean up the WD drive, now when I went to clean up the new Lacie drive the files I deleted are gone but it is not freeing up any space. I went to disk utilities and re-formatted but it wiped it clean, is there such a way to delete a few files here and there and gain the space they were taking up without going this route?
I recently bought a Macbook and I have a external USB hard drive that is formatted NTFS. I copied all of the files off of external HD and pasted them on my Macbook. I slicked the external hard drive and formatted it as FAT32 so I could read & write on both a PC and Mac if I need.
Anyways, once the external hard drive was formatted I tried moving all of the files back to the external but I keep getting and error code once I paste the files on the external drive. It says: "Sorry, the operation could not be completed because an unexpected error occurred. Error code 0"
Now I'm not sure if the files are locked or what but I need help. I want to move them back to the external drive. It actually copies a few files to the external but nowhere near what all I need. They are just some .doc files that are on there
Recently I just converted my old PC's 250gb Hard drive into an external drive. In the beginning everything worked fine. Though I could only read the files from it on my mac, I was fine with that because there was so much old music and pictures that I wanted to get off of it. There happened to be one particular picture that I couldn't find searching through the HDD with my mac, so I thought maybe I would be able to find if I looked for it through a windows system.
So I then plugged the external into my Windows laptop. After failing to find the picture on the PC, I plugged the hard drive back into my mac, but for some reason it's not showing the files. The hard drive is being found, but when i click on them in the finder no files show! The drive is not erased because the capacity and amount free is still the same. And to put the icing on the cake when I plugged the drive back into my PC a message comes up that says "The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error".
I have an IMAC and I am having problems transferring video files I download to my external hard drive. I had trouble playing the files at first because it was not readable with Quicktime. I downloaded VPN and it played with VPN. I don't want to save those files on my computer so I would like to transfer it to my external harddrive. When I try to drag it over, it won't let me drop it in. I am new to the MAC world. Is there a way to choose where it will save itself right before you download like there is on windows. I click on it and it does not prompt you, it just starts downloading.
I have recently made the plunge into mac kingdom and very pleased so far.
I am going through the pain staking task of transferring music, photos etc.. from my windows laptop to my new macbook pro.
I started off by setting up file sharing and copying files but it is taking absolutely ages.
Ideally I would like to use my 500gb mybook external hard drive but given an experience I just had when putting a memory stick in my mac straight after loading it up from my pc am I likely to lose all my current external hard drive data?
Complete ball ache if thats the case as all my films are on there and burning it all to DVD would take forever.
finder application stopped finding certain types of files on an external drive. The external drive (WD 80GB) is recognised and I have access to all files, however, when I search for specific files in the finder window it wont find pdf, txt, doc files. It does find picture files such as jpg. I have tried using the drive on my laptop (snow leopard) and macmini (leopard)
Basically I just got myself the latest MacBook as an upgrade from an old laptop. With my old laptop I had no problems what so ever when using my external hard drive. To delete any files I didn't want I would just right click and press the delete option. However, when connected to my new Mac, there is no such option when right clicking on a file. I've tried dragging the file to a recycling bin but I get a message from the finder saying this file can't be deleted. I've tried moving the file out of my hard drive which worked and then deleting it which was fine but the file remained in the external hard drive as I'd only created a copy. I can't figure out how to delete files I don't want. Deleting everything on the hard drive is out of the question.
All files on my external hard drive are missing. I was connecting my laptop to my external hard drive. It was taking an unusually long time. Once it did finally connect, two external hard drive icons appeared. then everything froze. I restarted my computer, but it wouldn't restart. After three days it finally restarted but nothing is on my hard drive. Mac os version 10.4.11
