12-17-2010, 10:59 AM

Last week I woke up and plugged my external 1TB Western Digital Hard Drive into my iBook and I got this message, ""this disk is not readable by this computer"". I've used this HD for almost 2 years and have had zero problems.

It gave me three options: Initialize, Reject, Ignore

I selected ignore and immediately went to Disk Utility, and the drive wouldn't mount, and the partitions weren't showing, and the name of the drive was different.

I ejected, and tried again. I got the same message. This time I selected "Initialize" thinking that, that meant to mount it.

It took 1 second to initialize. But it still didn't mount, so I went to Disk Utility, and it was showing zero partitions, the name was changed to a default WD name.

I've got about 250GB worth of data on this drive.

Any ideas of how I can go about recovering it?

12-17-2010, 11:37 AM

DiskWarrior didn't even recognize the HD
Stellar Phoenix doesn't recognize the HD, unless I click on Search/Find Delete Files. Then when I select the HD, and click start. Stellar Phoenix locks up.

Boomerang Data Recovery - Says that no partitions are found, and therefore can't recover data.

When I initialize I think it just wiped the structure of the partition, but didn't delete any data because it only took 1 sec to initialize. To delete 300GB of data would take more than a second.

12-17-2010, 02:39 PM

It sounds like the drive had an electronic failure. The drive mechanism is probably still in good condition but the drive electronics are defective. In my experience when this happens, recovery software is useless. When you initialized the drive the partition table was overwritten not the data. Which means it could be reformatted and used again. Of course you don't want to do that.

In my opinion, about the only way you're going to be able to get your data back is by sending the drive to a recovery service. And you don't want to do that unless the data is mission critical and you're willing to spend lots of $$ for the service. Sorry I can't be of more help. Perhaps someone else may be able to chime in with a solution or idea.

12-22-2010, 04:51 AM

Nope, chscag has it correct. Expect to pay around $1200 or so to get that data back.