EX HD Problem !

Hi,

I have 1 TB Ex.HD and it was working perfectly with my MacBook Pro running Leopard. But recently one of my friends took the HD to get some files from it, but it didnt work with his Windows Vista, so he was trying to get it work but no use.

After that I got it back and when I tried to connect it to my MacBook Pro it didnt show up in the desktop!, when I go to Disk Utility I can find it there, I have tried to repair it, but I cant click on the repair button! and when I tried to Verify it it says "Verify volume failed: Unrecognized Filesystem"

I dont know how to solve this problem, I have over 600GB of data in that HD and most of them are related to work and very important

Any help !?
and thanks in advance

Bad news.... I'd be on the phone...now... and asking what he did to your drive.

Am only guessing here that you had it formatted as HFS+. It sounds to me like your "friend" reformatted the drive to NTFS and all your data is gone. You can install this demo, just to see if this enables your machine to see the partition.


If so, only options now are to invest the $200 or so to buy one of the data recovery apps and another 1TB drive to move anything it can find onto, or send the drive out to the specialists to the possible tune of a couple thousand dollars or more and no guarantees with either route.


Important note here for all reading this: NEVER, EVER loan out any drive to anyone when you don't have your data backed up...period.

uhhhh .. thats really a bad news :S
Do you recommend any of the data recovery apps ?


and thanks for helping

well I just talked to him, he is not sure what he was doing :S
but he guess that he initialized the HD or some thing like that !!

does it mean anything ?, because I dont know what does that mean !!?

I have never personally had to use any of them. Learned my lesson many, many years ago.

I have read some good things about Disk Warrior. But it's primary description is related to recovering data from a failed or failing drive. Don't have a clue if it will work on one that has been formatted and particularly formatted as NTFS (and this is just my best guess here).

I really don't have a clue where to start except start googling, find some apps that say they can recover data from formatted partitions. Then email the company, tell them what has happened and ask if their software will work to recover data from HFS that has been overwritten as NTFS.

Yep, he formatted it. Here's a little screen shot tutorial of the hard drive initialization wizard in XP. Probably very similar in Vista.