Data Recovery From my External Hard Drive

I had a pretty bad few days! Not sure how but I lost a lot of data from my Mac. I think somehow part of my profiles or library was lost.

I had to do an archive and install and I managed to get my Mac back working however when I connected to my External Hard drive to recover my data it's not working, it asks me to initialize the disk.

Will this erase my data????

When I run Disk Utility I get the following message.

Verify and Repair volume “disk1s3”
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Invalid node structure
Invalid B-tree node size
Invalid node structure
Invalid B-tree node size
Volume check failed.
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.

I'm confident I haven't lost the data, but how do I get it back?

Can anybody recommend any data recovery software?

Or a way to access my data?

Please help!

GP

Initializing the disk will result in ALL your data being erased and lost. You don't want to do that until you have at least recovered or tried to recover the data off the drive first.

You can give recovery software a try but if the disk is beyond repair, not even that may work:

Data Rescue II 1.2.1 software download - Mac OS X - VersionTracker

Regards.

Thanks chscag,

I looked at Data Rescue II and downloaded the demo but that seemed unable to even see the drive.

Any other ideas?

GP