12-01-2010, 09:43 AM

I have had a USB external hard drive for several years plugged into my Power G4. The partition type is Apple_HFS. Everything was fine until this morning. Out of the blue, I heard the drive turn off and back on. When OS 10.4.11 mounted the drive again it had crazy characters and the drives name had been changed to and a bunch of crazy characters that looked like files but had no size to them and when I would click on one it would disappear (see attached). The drive now reads 232GB available and 232GB available!! What?!!! I had over 98GB of files from over 10 years on this drive. I ran disk utility and there were no errors. I turned the drive off and back on with no luck. I rebooted with no luck. The drive will mount but now the partition type reads DOS_FAT_32 and all my files seem to be gone. What the heck happened and is there anyway to restore my files?

Someone PLEASE HELP!!

12-01-2010, 02:51 PM

Try mounting the drive on another Mac to see if it can be read. It looks like the file tables have been scrambled - hopefully your data can be rescued if the drive is defective. Let us know. Post back and we'll go from there.