Dead or just mostly dead?

June 29, 2007 5:05 PM

My external drive has gone pfft. Now what?

Mac user with a 200 GB Maxtor firewire drive. Drive is suddenly not appearing in the finder. Disk utility can't find it either. A couple of questions:

1. Is it really all gone? One partition of the drive was just a backup of my system, but the other had some files of a more *personal* nature that I'd really like to try and retrieve, if possible. Is there any other utility that might help me at least let me peek into the file directory and save some stuff?

2. What's my best bet for my next drive? This one failed with little warning, so I'm not inclined to get another Maxtor.

posted by Gilbert to computers & internet (2 comments total)

1. It may not be the drive itself that has gone south. Try hooking it up to an IDE-to-USB kit or a different enclosure and see if it will work then. How old is the drive?

2. Maxtor is notorious for bad drives. I've had success with a Western Digital MyBook 400GB drive. The new Seagate FreeAgent line looks pretty good, too.
posted by roomwithaview at 5:14 PM on June 29, 2007

I'm a Mac user here, too. I've had a number of drives temporarily fail on me throughout the years - but none were ever completely unrecoverable (yet. knocking on wood).

Every time it's happened, I've used DiskWarrior (IANA Alsoft employee/advertister/etc) and I've been able to recover my data. Most of the time, I just transfer the stuff to a new drive, and if I use the old drive, it's for data I can stand to lose if the drive dies again someday.
posted by revmitcz at 5:33 PM on June 29, 2007