External Hard Drive Problem

[thisdj]

I had a USB external hard drive connected to my intel iMac. The mac went to sleep while the hard drive was plugged in ( so the drive was not ejected ). I now cannot mount the drive or see it in the disk utility on any mac. The drive was formatted FAT 32 so I could switch back and forth between macs and PC's. The drive is not recognized by any other macs or PC's. What can I do ? Please help.

 

[louishen]

is it making a spinning sound when you switch it on?

 

[thisdj]

Wow, thanks for the quick reply. Yes, the drive powers on and spins fine.

 

[cmcastillo]

I have the same problem. It worked for a while but now won't mount.

Can anyone please help me recover 10 years worth of digital pics on this external drive? I tried plugging it back to my PC where I used it for quite a while too but now says that it need to be reformatted.

 

[chscag]

I have the same problem. It worked for a while but now won't mount.

Can anyone please help me recover 10 years worth of digital pics on this external drive? I tried plugging it back to my PC where I used it for quite a while too but now says that it need to be reformatted.

Sounds like the drive has quit. If it's formatted to FAT-32 you might try using one of the many free data recovery programs that are available for Windows. There are several for the Mac but they are expensive.

Here's a link for Windows software: Link

Note, however, if the drive will not mount (can't be seen by the PC) then no data recovery software is going to work. You'll need something that can access the drive on a low level and perhaps extract the data.

You might try: Gibson Research "Spinrite" Link

The only other alternative is a professional data recovery service which is very expensive to use.

Regards.