External Hard Drive :(

Soldato
Joined
27 Jun 2006
Posts
6,187
Hi. I've spent most of the morning trying to get data off my old hard drives. I bought a cheap SATA/IDE to USB kit off the auction site (could be the problem) but if I'd have bought a caddy it would be the same sort of setup - so I'll continue.

I've managed to get the drive to connect in OS X. I was looking through the files and everything was ship-shape - started to transfer it over to my new drive and it un-mounted in that lovely way that it does. Did that about two more times and I'm not sure why.

Stuck Vista on Boot-Camp and thought I'd have more luck with that, given that Windows would be more used to dealing with all types of drives - but it's not even recognising it. I'm getting the noise when you plug a USB device in and the driver for 'USB MASS Storage Device' is installing fine - but nothing there.

Checked Computer Management as well, nothing there.

As I've posted this in the Mac forum, I'd be happier to make it work with OS X, especially given the drive I'm transferring it onto is in Journal OS X (saves me installing MacDrive on Windows) - anyone got any ideas?

As I've said, it has picked it up a few times, just having trouble with the un-mouting of itself.

Knowing my luck I'll eventually get it working to find out the hard drive has corrupted itself with this mornings efforts.

Cheers.

Edit

Okay, so I've somehow managed to get it picked up in Vista. It's in two partitions but in the explorer both are empty. So I went into the Computer Management section and both partitions are 'healthy' and are in their appropriate sizes of partition - so I assume the data is still there.

However, the filing system is RAW - which doesn't bode well from what I have read elsewhere. Is my only alternative to use a recovery program? I obviously can't format as I have stuff on there.

Also, this may be better in hard drives / windows forums - so if a passing mod would be kind enough :)
 
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If it's been formatted in HFS+ then Vista won't be able to read or write to it, but it will show up.

I think the problem lies on a hardware level if it's unmounting in OS X.

Can you boot in to recovery mode on the Mac and try again?
 
It was in NTFS - It's come straight out of my old computer. I think the unmounting it did the first time in OS X has borked it and it's now in RAW file format.

Which I think means that it needs to be recovered. Just going through past threads to see what would be the best (Windows based) program to use, unfortunately I have a lot of important stuff on the drive. :(

=CLOSE THIS PLEASE=
 
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