Hi Matt, So sorry to hear of your dilemma. Indeed if you Initialise your external drive it will wipe off any of the data it contains.
I have in the past used the application Data Rescue successfully in recovering data from damaged USB Camera memory cards, so this may be one option. Alternatively, does your WD firewire has also a USB port? If so have you tried to connect it to your computer via USB? I had a problem with an old WD Firewire drive which was not even mounting on my desktop. But I managed to mount it using the USB port and promptly copied it. I have been using a lot of WD external drives through the years, but have had a few failures, and lately 2 x WD 1.5 TB drives failed. But due to updated copy of my data using SuperDuper I did not have to worry. Must add that the % failure of the WD is very low considering the amount of such drives I have used and the large amount of data they contain! Wishing you success in recovering the data. Best Regards, Philippe Chaperon Philippe dit la Grenouille ...šø On 9 Mar 2020, at 1:21 pm, Matt Falvey <[email protected]> wrote: Hi, I have a WD 1.5Tb firewire Ext HDD which stores the family videos. Over the course of years I have had many problems with it for some reasons not turning on and on other occasions not showing up on my iMac desktop. It would work in about 5% of the attempts. As I knew I was retiring last year and would have more time available, I put off worrying about it. Last year in the US I picked up a Voyager S3 3.5 SATA drive dock to try to bypass the problem, whether it be, the Mybook power source, the on/off Switch or the WD Case. When I loaded the Ext HDD in the dock I had the following message āThe disk you inserted was not readable by this computerā And it gave me three options:- Initializeā¦, Ignore, or Eject. Well, the last two were not going to be very helpful and the first one Initialize filled me with dread as it was always formatted as an OS X Extended disc and I believe you canāt initialize without erasing? I have another WD 1Tb Firewire Ext HDD, which loaded into the dock without a problem, is readable and is in the same format OS X Extended as the ānot readableā 1.5Tb was. I tried Disk Utility to run First Aid on the 1.5Tb and the Voyager S3 Media shows up under External, but there is no drop down arrow as there is when I use the 1.0Tb. It states 1.5TB Unitialized. Then Location - Eternal, Connection - USB, Partition Map - Not Supported, S.M.A.R.T. status - Not Supported, Capacity - 1.5 Tb, Child count -0, Type - Disk, Device -disk1. When I ran First Aid on it, I got the Message, āFirst Aid process is complete, click Done to continueā The arrow Show Details when activated says - Operation successful. The only other options available on Disk Utility are āEraseā which obviously I donāt want to do and āInfoā which repeats much of the previous information in the last paragraph along with, Volume type - Unknown, File system - Unknown, Writable - No, Owners enabled - No, Is encrypted - no, Can be verified - no, Can be repaired - no, Bootable - no, Journaled - No. I tried DiskWarrior. A disk appeared as [Unrecognizable Format] - under Directory but the Rebuild button was greyed out Overview - Directory cannot be rebuilt, the partition map may be corrupt. -This disk is an external USB disk. -This disk is 1.50 TB in size. -This disk is not mounted. -disk1 Directory Optimisation Index - empty A Directory Optimization Index could not be calculated for this disk because of a disk malfunction. Rebuild this disk as soon as possible to recover your files. The disk did not appear under Files or Hardware. Any ideas of where do I go from here to try and recover the files? Are there any alternative strategies that I could try or I might have missed? Or should I be looking at a Data Recovery Application or a Data Recovery Store? Thanks Matt. -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Settings & Unsubscribe - <http://lists.wamug.org.au/listinfo/wamug.org.au-wamug>
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