Oops, I wiped my External HDD!

Howdy Folks

I'm Bob Smith, new to the forum, amateur to Mac!
I've done a silly thing... I've got a 1TB external drive which I use for all of my Media storage (pics, music, films, etc) and whilst creating a partition I clicked - instead of + in disk utility!

It would appear that I've lost all of my files!
However, after the event I unplugged straight away, and now I keep getting asked to initialize the unit.
So I'm wondering, since I've not actually done anything to it yet, can I retrieve my lost data? When I plugged it into my other computer its still asking to Initialize, so I'm really hoping the data's still there!

In all honesty, I can get the music & such back, but there's about 8 years worth of photos that I'll cry if I lose.
I'd like to avoid taking it to a recovery service if I can do it myself first.

Cheers
Bob

Give this thread a shot.

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os...541-macintosh-os-x-data-recovery-options.html

Cheers, I'm checking out the free open source one, however I'm not really up on this sort of thing. My computers usually just a tool to me, & for everything else (i.e.: music recording backups for my work) I've got in at least 3 places.
I"I think I'll be spending the morning doing a little reading!

TestDisk is really confusing

I haven't looked at that one, and since it's terminal based, probably never will. (Knock on wood, have never needed data recovery - at least not since I quit allowing anyone to log onto one of my computers with admin privileges back around '93.)

I'd probably go with his suggestion in the 4th post of Data Rescue 3.

Well I'm trying Mac Keeper (trial version). The problem is the HD wants to initialize when I plug it in.
I'm correct in assuming that'll ruin everything and completely format the HD? Is that right? Because Mac Keeper will only see it that way.

Stay away from MacKeeper, it's junkware and can do more harm than good. Go with the suggestion that bobtomay gave you about using Data Rescue 3. If you haven't used the external drive since accidentally removing the partition, Data Rescue 3 should be effective in getting back all your data.

I know it's not inexpensive, so you're going to have to decide if your lost data is worth $99 or not.

Another vote for Data Rescue 3. It should recover it all. Just do not do anything with the drive till you run it.

bobsmith85 said:

TestDisk is really confusing

Click to expand...

I haven't used it on a Mac drive but did use it to successfully recover EVERYTHING from an external 500gb drive that was no longer mounting in Windows, it too kept saying I needed to initialize it. And my drive had "gone bad". I since re-formatted it but it keeps having read/write errors but had no problem reading from it using testdisk.

There are step by step instructions so if you can get past the initmidation of it all being dos/terminal based it does work great and it is free. It even showed all the recoverable files that had previously been purposely deleted. I recovered some of those just to check it out and voila!

Go into Disk Utility and see if the external appears when connected. If any luck, highlight it and run Repair Disk and see what is reported. If it is not appearing or greyed out time for another hard drive.