IMac :: Unable To Access Hard Drive / Disk Is Unreadable
Sep 14, 2009
Okay. So I had an Imac G5 (white) running 10.4 This one crashed and I got a new iMac G5 (Silver). Since then I have removed the old hard drive. Today I connected it to a Serial ATA - USB Converter. It powers up and sounds to be working fine (hums, spinning) but my new computer says "Disk is unreadable". It gives me the option to format, but I want to recover my old files first.
Important: I also have a similar Lacie external drive that I hooked up the same way and it worked fine. I was able to take the files off of it.
My guess: I believe when the drive is connected, it is trying to start up the OS (this was the start up disc). It has that click sound like it's trying to make the chime and then spinning like it's working. Can you change the drive to a "Slave"? Or is my disc corrupted?
I am considering purchasing diskwarrior but want to make sure it can help my situation before I purchase it. My imac will not boot from the internal hard drive (Intel processor) When I use disk utility to try and repair the disk, I get error messages and it won't repair. I can see the HD but cannot repair it. When I connect using target mode with my mac book pro, the hard drive does not appear on my host (macbook pro) computer. I have reloaded OS X (Leopard) onto a firewire external drive and can boot my imac that way but I can not find my original internal Macintosh HD. Will disk warrior be able to help with this scenario. I would really like to access that internal Macintosh HD and retrieve my files.
I had mounted my drive to a G5 tower and it was severely frozen and would not let me shut down. I forced the computer off while the drive was still running and now when I try to mount it it, every computer tells me that the drive I inserted is not readable, and it gives me the option to initialize, ignore, or eject. I don't want to lose any of that data, is there anyone that knows how to recover these files?
I have a G3 Blue. It has been upgraded with a new hard drive and memory. I am currently on 10.4.9 I think. This morning the computer was making an odd noise and I had to reboot it. When it came up the old hard drive from 3 years ago was the only one I could access. How can I get to the new hard drive again?
I'm using a 1.42ghz Macmini running 10.4.11. I've been using a Lacie 500 G firewire external hard drive for over a year to store and retrieve files. I have several movies in the mp4 format stored on the Lacie external hard drive. I recently opened one of the movies in full screen (quicktime). It ran for about 10 minutes before freezing up. I watched the spinning beach ball for about 5 minutes. Unable to force quit Quicktime, I pulled the plug on the Macmini. After restarting the computer, the icon for the Lacie external hard drive no longer appeared on the desktop.
I tried several different things to get the icon back, including: repairing the permissions and shutting down the external drive and unplugging the power supply for several minutes before reconnecting the external drive to the computer. The external drive doesn't show up in either the System Profiler or Disk Utilities.
My Intel based imac (purchased in Sept 07) won't boot up because there's an unreadable movie dvd in the disc drive that won't eject... when I turn on the computer, all that happens is it plays the opening chime and displays a white screen... I'm wondering if someone can help or suggest what's going on: Basically I put a movie dvd in my imac that my regualar dvd player wouldn't play so I thought I'd try it in my imac. Once inserted, the disc drive tried to read it but it wouldn't mount, it just made an odd spinning/grinding sound. It wouldn't eject using the keyboard eject button so I shut down my computer so that I could call a friend to ask for advice.
My friend gave me several options to try - holding the left mouse button at start up, hold C down on keyboard, command option O F to open firmware, reboot pram but non of them work. Basically when I start my imac it immediately tries to read the unreadable dvd and doesn't get to the normal start up procedure, it just shows a white screen and chokes on the dvd. Is there a way to manually eject the cd or does the machine have to be opened up and the cd physically removed? Is it likely that my imac will start up normally once the unreadable dvd is removed? I hope my hard drive hasn't gone bad because I haven't backed it up in a long time... Is there a strong possibility that my hard drive is toast?
I received an Acomdata 2Tb external hard drive today from Amazon and plugged it in. Time Machine popped up and I declined to link the hard drive to it. I went into Disk Utility and chose the new hard drive on the left column and went to erase. I chose Mac OS Extended. I named it and hit erase. It started going, and going..... and going... and a half an hour later I knew something was wrong.
Disk Utility was not responding and I eventually had to Force Quit. Now I cannot format the hard drive. I starts and then it stops with a disk error. I tried to run the First Aid verify and repair and both stopped after a few seconds with an error. What do I do?
I cannot believe I am actually in this position, but I accidentally reformatted my lacie 1TB external HD. The files were not overwritten as it was the most basic and quick format option, but they are not accessible.
Can anyone recommend a good data recovery app that works for OS X?
Anyone know what the best course of action would be?
I'm using a desktop IMac 15" and have come up against a problem I can't solve. I selected the disk drive as the start-up drive. Put the wrong disk in the drive and it is unable to start the comp. Now I have a blank screen and cannot eject the disk.
This is the first MAC I've ever had that does not have manual ejection for the disk drive.
G5 iMac model A1058, 1.8/512mb/160gb.Bought this machine used on e-bay with no operating system, powers on fine, flashing folder with question mark= no operating system. Tried to connect to my i-book in target disk mode via fire wire and the hard drive does not mount on the desktop. Can't find it in disk utilities however i get this in system profiler under firewire.
So here is my bright idea. I still may want to have Windows on my iMac for work projects *sigh* I think I came up with a solution, I rather not partition my iMac (when I buy it) 1TB drive for Windows. Don't want Windows on my main disk - I need the storage for Mac things, personal stuff etc. Is it possible to boot from a Firewire connected external HDD to run Windows?
My new iMac is arriving tomorrow and I need to transfer everything over to it. I know about Migration Assistant, but I want to know if there will be any complications due to the data I have on an external hard drive.
Specifically, I currently have an older (white) iMac hooked up to two 2TB external hard drives. One if for backup but the other one has all my iPhoto and iTunes content on it, including about 1.5 TB of movies and TV shows that I have ripped. None of this material is on the computer's internal hard drive - it is all on the external hard drive.
Because my new iMac has a 2 TB internal hard drive, I want to transfer all the iPhoto and iTunes content currently on the external hard drives onto the internal hard drive of the new iMac. Will Migration Assistant handle this and will it be clear what I need to do?
I'm praying someone can give me a miracle cure here but im pretty sure its a terminal case. i have a 24inch iMac 2.66ghz core 2 duo and a western digital 1tb external usb hard drive....this hard drive was bought a month or so ago with the sole purpose of store years and years of media to free up valuable space on my iMac hard drive....tonight without any warning at all the drive icon disappears from my desktop with an error message and now refuses to load, when i click initialise on the error dialogue box it takes me to disk utility.
in disk utility i have tried repairing disk and i get the message "invalid node structure". it then tells me it cannot be repaired and i need to re-format my hard drive.
as i said there is literally YEARS of info on this drive that i really really dont want to lose, is there anything i can do, or anything worth trying. as a side note on the front of the drive it has a capacity gauge and has gone from 3/4's full to not showing anything.
I bought a WD My Book Essential to do Time Machine backups. It is formatted for a PC but I was told I need to format for my IMac before I can use it. How do I do that? Is it a complicated process? I have only been using a Mac for about a year now and am still learning about them.
i have just bought and external hard drive and want to put stuff on it. i know i hav to format it somehow using disk utility on my imac. what do i format it to so i can use it on both mac and pc? it is set to read only in "get info" and ms-dos fat in disk utility.
Yesterday I reformatted my Macintosh hard drive, partitioned it, installed Snow Leopard on one partition and Windows 7 on the other. I installed all the drivers for Windows 7 from the Snow Leopard disc.
When I plug in my 1TB Seagate external hardrive it's not showing up in Snow Leopard or Windows 7. Not even in Disk Utility. I tried plugging the external drive into my Windows laptop and a pop-up comes up saying "USB Device Not Recognised. One of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognise it." I think that this may just be because it's formatted to Mac OSX?
The hardrive had all of my photos, videos and music on so I hope it's salvageable. I find it hard to believe that the hard drive malfunctioned at the same time I reinstalled the software onto the iMac.
My 500gb iMac (purchased April 2010) is about at capacity. 350gb of space is taken up by home movies (.mov) in iMovie. I bought an external hard drive and have moved about 200gb over to that drive.
After transfer, I deleted the original Events off iMovie and emptied the trash. I checked in both iMovie and in Finder and no longer see those files present on the Mac.
I thought this was going smooth and everything worked perfectly, but….when i went to check how much storage space i created on the Mac, the amount of available space barely budged (i moved 200gb of data to the new drive and i created about 30gb of space on the Mac).
Are these "deleted" files hidden somewhere and I need to go delete from somewhere else? How do I make sure I get back the storage that i need?
I have a G5 Imac and a G4 ibook. i want to use time machine, and have one external hard drive connect to both. I could get an external with more than one input (ie, usb and firewire)--does that work? Could i use a usb hub to connect the 2 computers to the HD, and set up different partitions?
And what of NAS? i do not want to set up a whole network (we already have one at my office, and i want this to be independent).
So I tried to partition my 1TB Seagate main hard drive that's in my iMac, and twice my iMac locked up at the "Shrinking volume" stage. I tried to shrink it down from 1TB to 600GB and it not only did not work, my system locked up (I gave it plenty of time) to the point where I had to forcibly shut it down and a subsequent verification of the disk revealed that it needed to be repaired using Disk Utility after restarting and booting from my OS X installation disk, which worked just fine.
I decided to try again, because the first time, I had not restarted the computer in a while, so I thought I'd "flush out" any temporary files, cache, inactive RAM, and whatever else might have been in the way the first time around. However, this time, the screen simply turned off after 15 or so minutes. Once again, it got stuck at the "Shrinking volume" point and there was also no way to revive it except for a forced shutdown, which, by the way, I did by holding down the power button on the back of the iMac. Same story, I had to restart and repair the disk using my OS X installation disk, which resolved the repair issue.
One more thing. I remember that when I first received my iMac, I was able to partition the drive in order to add a volume for Boot Camp, which I formatted in NTFS right before my Windows 7 installation. All of that worked great and I was actually impressed with how flawless that whole process executed. Eventually, I decided that I no longer needed Windows 7, so I erased the partition and re-consolidated it with the main OS X partition, again, without any problems.
With all of that said, I'm not sure what to try next, but I would really like to create 2 additional volumes. I thought I would try using Disk Utility again, but this time, booting from my OS X installation disk. Then again I didn't want to chance it again, as I have not made any backups yet. I'm in the process of making a backup right now.
So what do you guys think? Should I try to do just that, using Disk Utility after booting into the installation disk? What do you guys think is the reason as to why I can't just resize and partition using Disk Utility after a regular boot-up like I was able to before? What else could I try? Any third-party software titles like I used in Windows? Acronis and Partition Manager come to mind. I'd rather do it in OS X, though.
I can't access my hard disk please if somebody nows about any Company that can get my sensitive data Back, I don,t need the Disk what I need is the information on the Disk.
I've download a Seagate Diagnostics programme to check whether my external Seagate FreeAgent Desk is working properly or not. However, when I run the programme, it indicates that cannot find the disk.
Today I went to plug in my Lacie 250 GB USB external hard drive into my 13 in. MacBook to get a shirt template for a design I am making. I discovered that the hard drive just would not mount and show on the desktop, and I remembered that this happened a few days before, but all I did was unplug it and plug it back in, and it worked... except that today, that didn't work at all. I tried the other USB port, and the hard drive showed up on the desktop for about a second, and then disappeared. I kept on replugging it back into both USB ports, but nothing happened.
Then I tried to see if it would work on the PC beside me, and it was recognized as an external device; however, a message came up telling me the drive was malfunctioning. I am guessing this is from ejecting it incorrectly (because I am in a hurry to head to my next classes...I use this laptop at school), but I have incorrectly disconnected it before in the past and this problem never happened to me before.
Every single project I have ever created for my design career is on that hard drive, and all I want now is to get my files back. All I need it to do is show up on the desktop for just the right amount of time for me to copy my files onto my computer.
I read online to put it into the freezer for a while and it should mount, but that didn't work. I tried using Disk Warrior, Data Rescue 3, and Tech Tool Deluxe, but the hard drive did not show up on any of those apps.I tried plugging the hard drive into an iMac as well, but it did not show up either.
My PowerBook G4 (Alum) died. I've had it for 4 years, taken it with me to Alaska and all over the lower 48, and have had nothing but happy experiences. I knew she was gonna go, but I was hoping she'd hold on until I could afford a MacBook. Alas, no. The problem appears to be the ability of the logic board to communicate with the hard drive. I can hear the HD spin, but even with Disk Warrior, I cannot locate it. The Mac Geniuses at my local Apple store confirmed this and gave me a shoulder to cry on. I've run Disk Warrior, Disk Utility, and tried finding it using the target disk mode - no luck.
The problem is that I've got 4 years of teaching materials, 6000 songs, and irreplaceable pictures on the HD, so I can't bring myself to just trash it. It's true that you only fail to back up you stuff once. This is my once. I've heard that with PC hard drives, you can just drop the old HD into a USB HD box and use it as an external HD. I can't afford professional data retrevial, and I want to give this option a try if it'll work with a Mac HD. Any ideas or suggestions?
I have a USB disk attached to my Airport Extreme, and use it as the target of my time machine backups from my mac book pro (connected via WiFi). For the most part things work fine. But if my macbook goes to sleep, after it wakes up it often (not always) gets the next time machine backup to fail with a message saying that it cannot access the disk. At first I found a brutal method of correcting it: I would disconnect from WiFi, go to my AE and power cycle it. After it came back the macbook never had any problem with the disk. A little more exploration indicated that Lion wasn't unmounting the disk properly. The following works (but sometimes requires a few iterations): I'll go to finder, eject the disk, and disconnect from Airport Extreme, and then go to the terminal and do sudo diskutil unmountdisk disk1 (I first do a diskutil list to find out the right disk)
and then ask time machine to backup again. Many times I have to repeat this a few more times before it "takes". Has anyone else run into this? It clearly looks like a bug in Lion, since it never happened until I upgraded.
PS. I understand that Apple says that they don't support time machine backup to network disks. But they do to a time capsule! It isn't really different.
I know this is going to be an incredibly easy fix, but I can't find it. The Hard Drive on my new iMac is not appearing on my desktop, nor is it appearing in the "Device" menu in Finder.
I have a 2TB Western Digital My Book Studio FW800 external that has 5 partitions, connected to my 2011 iMac. I had help doing the partitions and don't really remember the reasoning, but one is just for my SuperDuper! backup, one is Miscellaneous, one for movie clips off my camcorder, one for misc scanned photo's and one for my genealogy research. I back up using Time Machine to a Time Capsule and also to this WD hard drive with SuperDuper!
Recently I'm getting a pop up message that "Mac OS X can't repair the disk "Genealogy"'. And it needs to be reformatted. It's become a read only disk. When I look in Disk Utility it shows all the partitions as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" EXCEPT for the one in question. I also noticed that there are a lot of files with "date created" being the same date in 1969! These files may be letters I've written or photo's I added to that partition within the last few years.
I think I have to completely reformat the entire external hard drive to repair this, but I want to make sure. Because it's going to be a major hassle backing it all up to another external (having to get one first) and then figuring out how to make the files that have turned "read only" in that one partition, back to their original state! Does this sound right, that I have to reformat the entire external hard drive? And how do I get the read-only files back to their original state.
I have a Seagate 1 TB Backup Plus Drive which was working perfectly fine until I plugged it into a USB hub. It detected it while in the hub and I was able to get files off of it, but when I ejected it from the hub and put it back into the USB slot on the computer it was not detected by finder. It shows up in the disk utility and I clicked verify and repair and it says:
Verify and Repair volume “Seagate Backup Plus Drive” Checking file system Volume repair complete. Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
Is there any way to get this to work properly again? Or if not is there a way for me to recover my files on the external hard drive?
I have a Macbook PRO late 2011 running OS X Mavericks.
