My EXT hhd problem - NEED help badly

Hello

got my imac in the post two days ago, and everythings good, apart from...

i plugged my external hard drive (seagate 320gb) in, and everything worked fine. i accessed all my films, music and photos etc.

i watched a film, and after this pressed shut down, the screen went black, so i turned off the external. suddenly the screen came back on and warned me i shouldnt have done this, and said eject properly in future, which i always do anyway, i just thought the computer was off.

now, plugging it in, it says it is not readable on this computer. the options for repair are greyed out when i click the option to go into disk utility.

i plugged the drive into an old windows laptop where it used to be used, and now it wants to format, and wont open up, it actually doesnt even get recognised as EXT:, which was my name for it, it now just says Local disk E:

this literally has ALL my music/film projects on. ALL my photos, and tens of thousands of music files, and films.

what can i do!?!?!?!?

You may want to give DiskWarrior a try and see if it can recover your data.
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/

BTW... what file system is the drive currently formatted with? HFS+, FAT32, etc..

it WAS fat32

on here (mac) it wont say what format, but back on the laptop, it now says RAW. but wont tell me how much data/space is on it

I also believe Data Rescue (?) has a demo you can try. I think it only looks to see if any data is there, but at least you'd know.
But I agree with lifeisabeach's recommendation.

Yeah... your problem here is a classic example of why FAT32 should be avoided at all costs. If a FAT32 volume doesn't get "ejected" properly, the file system just isn't robust enough to survive without major complications. Please refer to this earlier post of mine for more detailed info and solutions:
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showpost.php?p=571842&postcount=10

As for your current predicament... you could still try using DiskWarrior. Also... I once had a problem with an improperly-dismounted FAT32 volume that, on re-mount, showed a bunch of garbage on the drive. After a few proper ejects and remounts, the problem went away and I saw my data properly again. Try that... and maybe leave it plugged in for a bit.

right

well what about this...

on disk utility, if i go to erase, i can click the option to keep the data on the drive, and just erase the file system, while making it into aother one (mac OS extended?)

is that not what to do? or am i reading something wrong on leopard?

what format should i use from the options given?

mac os extended
" " case sensitive
" " journaled
" " case sensitive journaled?


im lost here, totally


also, downloading disk warrior from a site i use, its asking for a boot disk, which is also downloadable, but do i have to burn it onto a **** and use that as the boot disk its asking for?

please help, im new to macs

seroe said:

well what about this...

on disk utility, if i go to erase, i can click the option to keep the data on the drive, and just erase the file system, while making it into aother one (mac OS extended?)

is that not what to do? or am i reading something wrong on leopard?

Click to expand...

I'm not familiar with that option... in fact this is the first I've heard of it. I'll look into it more when I get home in a couple hours, but for now don't do that.

also, downloading disk warrior from a site i use, its asking for a boot disk, which is also downloadable, but do i have to burn it onto a **** and use that as the boot disk its asking for?

Click to expand...

A "site you use"? Look... get your software the legit way. Per forum rules, we cannot discuss or assist with pirated software.

too late!

i had to, as i tried the trial versions of the data recovery programs and they couldnt work with the file system that was on my external , coming up as RAW

i am now running Data Rescue 2, i actually bought it, as i didnt want to risk anything dodgy. on the free trial it came up with alot of stuff, so fingers crossed.

with regard to the cracked software, i am with you, i was only trying this time as i was in a hurry and didnt realise i could purchase this instantly online.

Well good luck with that. Let us know how it works out. If it does work out, be sure to avoid using FAT32 in the future. There's some ways to get OS X to read/write to NTFS partitions now, which is one of the better solutions IMO.

hi

left it on over night, and its recovered quite a chunk

although, the files are no longer in the obsessively arranged folder system i created. all types of audio are in files together. and the file names are changed in a lot of cases, but the ID3 tags when the mp3s are dropped into itunes are still sorted how i did them, in most cases.

this is frustrating, but as alot of the music was recorded onto my hd from vinyl, its still pretty lucky!

ill have to go through the 205 GB ( there was 290) that it has found and sort it out manually. BIG job

but before i copy the files back onto the drive, does anyone know of any other good recovery programs i could try?

i have reinstalled the drive on mac os extended file system. is this any good? do you think it will be compatible with PCs?

thanks guys