Recovering data off of an external harddrive?

I bought a Western Digital Elements 1.5TB external drive a few months ago, which as worked fine. I always disconnect it properly, etc., but when I got home today and plugged it into my Mac, it failed to be picked up by the computer. The drive seems to be working fine and in Disk Utility it's registering, but indented icon beneath the drive (UNTITLED--I never named my drive) is grey.

I called WD and they told me something is wrong with the partition, and that it needs to be re-partitioned. Thing is, I have a lot of material on the drive which I can't replace. Too much to have backed up elsewhere in a lot of cases, and I really want to get it off. Does anyone know how to do this? I was told there's software which can help me.

I called a data recovery place and they quoted $400-$1900 for the recovery. Ugh. Please, someone help!

I don't have any experience with crashed drives but I know that a lot of folks use Data Rescue 3 for Mac when the need to recover files arises.
You can use the trial to see if it can recover the files and then buy it if it can. ($99)

Computer Data Recovery, Mac Data Recovery Software, Mac Data Rescue, Digital Data Recovery Disk for Mac - Data Rescue 3

Quick question for you ... was it formatted Mac or Fat-32 or NTFS... there are alot of free data recovery tools for Windows ... have not found any for Mac yet but have not had to do a post mortem on a Mac Hard drive yet.

If it is something that can be read by windows you could try PC Inspector smart recovery
or something like it...

I like the stuff from EASEUS but some of their partition fixes are not free.

post is old but this is how I have recoved stuff CE's Geekbook: Do you know what an ID 10 T Error is??? "Data Image Recovery"

NOTE: Thread moved to appropriate forum. Not just anything goes in Anything Goes

csegeek said:

Quick question for you ... was it formatted Mac or Fat-32 or NTFS... there are alot of free data recovery tools for Windows ... have not found any for Mac yet but have not had to do a post mortem on a Mac Hard drive yet.

If it is something that can be read by windows you could try PC Inspector smart recovery
or something like it...

I like the stuff from EASEUS but some of their partition fixes are not free.

post is old but this is how I have recoved stuff CE's Geekbook: Do you know what an ID 10 T Error is??? "Data Image Recovery"

Click to expand...

It was originally formatted for PC, read-only for Mac, but the Apple Care people walked me through formatting it for both. Does that change things?

I would say that it was probably NTFS then and Apple had you format it Fat-32 ... so have you been using it on Windows machines as well...

If that is the case then... see if a windows machine can still read it...

also there are various partition recovery off line Linux Live CD's that will help with recovering lost or broken partitions ... but that would be beyond the scope of what I could put here in the forum..

PM me if you need to.