External Hard Drive Problem

I recently purchased an Iomega GDHDU External Hard Drive for storing video footage. I went through hoops to get a camera to capture all the footage with, and again to get the computer editor ready. This process took close to a year because of budget constraints. Finally, I managed to get everything onto the hard drive, and was editing for a little while. When I booted the computer today, suddenly the hard drive was no longer being detected, either in Finder, Disc Utility, or System Profiler. The Hard Drive seems to be working fine, and so does the Mac, so I'm not sure what's going on. I spoke to Iomega customer service but they were no help, they offered few suggestions and seemed to immediately want to replace the hard drive and charge me for the data recovery and shipping.

I was wondering if anyone has had a problem like this. I've seen other posts where its shown up in the disc utility or system profiler, but never like this.

You say the hard drive seems to be working fine.... How do you know that if you can't access it? I hate to agree with iOmega, but it sure looks like your drive has failed. Whether it was the on board controller (firmware also) or the drive itself really doesn't matter if it can't be accessed.

As far as getting your data back, there are programs you can try. I say "try" because a drive that's not being "seen" is difficult to extract data from.

You might want to try "Data Rescue III" to see if it can help. I believe you can download a trial version to test. If it works and can extract your data, go ahead and purchase a license to activate it.

Regards.