External Hard Drive / Cannot read data

I'm having some problems with my external 1TB WD Elements hard drive. It's formatted as mac/journaled. I've had it for almost 2 years and it hasn't given me issues until recently. I went to plug in the drive to the USB port and I got this error : " The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer " I immediately went to my disk utility and tried to run repair disk, verify disk, etc.. I tried using both USB ports. No luck. I have a macbookpro 2009 model, version 10.6.8. upgraded to 8 GB RAM. I purchased Diskwarrior and the drive now comes up on my desktop. When I open the folder to the disk, the folder is empty. But if you right click on the drive it shows 999.4 GB available and 663.4MB used. I had over 500GB of data on the drive. Is there any disk utility programs I can run on my drive to recover my data? I have music, pictures and movies. The drive runs, the drive seems to be working. I'm curious if I have a bad cable to the drive. It goes from USB to mini USB to the drive. I haven't tried plugging it into another mac either. Any ideas or recommendations? Thanks!!

andrew1982 said:

I'm having some problems with my external 1TB WD Elements hard drive. It's formatted as mac/journaled. I've had it for almost 2 years and it hasn't given me issues until recently. I went to plug in the drive to the USB port and I got this error : " The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer " I immediately went to my disk utility and tried to run repair disk, verify disk, etc.. I tried using both USB ports. No luck. I have a macbookpro 2009 model, version 10.6.8. upgraded to 8 GB RAM. I purchased Diskwarrior and the drive now comes up on my desktop. When I open the folder to the disk, the folder is empty. But if you right click on the drive it shows 999.4 GB available and 663.4MB used. I had over 500GB of data on the drive. Is there any disk utility programs I can run on my drive to recover my data? I have music, pictures and movies. The drive runs, the drive seems to be working. I'm curious if I have a bad cable to the drive. It goes from USB to mini USB to the drive. I haven't tried plugging it into another mac either. Any ideas or recommendations? Thanks!!

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Wow, that was fast!

I'm pretty desperate. It wont let me Repair Disk Permissions though

Glad to see you purchased Disk Warrior.

Read through the following thread which is in one of our other forums. It's similar to the problem you're having and may help you to retrieve the data from your hard drive which appears to have died. Go to this LINK.