Desperate for help re external hard drive

vintagegirl

I have a western digital 320gb external hard drive with everything on it.
I have tried to bring it up on my Macbook and it keeps coming up saying
' the disk you have inserted is not readable by this computer."

it then just says initialise, ignore or eject.
everything else is greyed out when i go to disk utility.
I have googled everything and everyone's basically saying that's it dead and can't be fixed

does anyone have any other advice that can help me?? please, i have recently lost my sister and this hard drive has all my videos of her
i'm so upset

fwor

My own personal experience of external drives is that there is a good chance that the failure will be due to the circuitry in the enclosure, and the HDD is OK.

Unfortunately on the other hand there is a fair probability that the HDD itself has failed - particularly if it has taken a knock while running.

The only way to distinguish between the two is to open up the enclosure, take the HDD out and put it in another caddy and hook it up to a PC or Mac and try again.

googler

Have you tried connecting it to another computer (since it can't be read by yours)?

I'd do that before opening up the caddy and transplanting the hard drive.

bluesnake

Try the drive on another computer. Then try another cable.

sometimes, if you are lucky, the only way to get data off is to CAREFULLY crack the plastic seams of hard drive case and physically connect it straight to the sata or ide port of a PC. Some of the newer drives are not ide or sata, but have are straight mini usb connection (no minature converter board) - and then your messed up from a diy perspective.

If the disk is not recognised in the bios(use a PC, probably not a laptop) after this, or 3rd party apps can't get to the disk, then it past the stage diy repair, however the data most likely is recoverable by a recovery company but think £

If you can get onto the disk, think more along the lines of copying data off it, than getting a usable disk back as its safer to presume the worst.

kingdavid2012

Sorry about your sister.
The problem seems that the wrong fomat of the disk led to the imcompatibility.
Just try another computer with different operating system.

robson947

kingdavid2012 wrote: »

Sorry about your sister.
The problem seems that the wrong fomat of the disk led to the imcompatibility.
Just try another computer with different operating system.

This is true!

Look at the data on the drive, if you don't need it, think about re formatting it to a format that is suitable for your PC/Laptop.

Mine is on exFat on a windows 7 PC because that is what works best for me.

As for retrieving the data on the hard drive already, ask a could of your friends to see if you can try it on their PC or laptop.

As a last resort and if the data is vital, maybe contact a local technician to see if they can extract the data?

yangptangkipperbang

If the HDD has a separate PSU try changing that. I had all sorts of problems with an ext HDD which I discovered (eventually !) were caused by the PSU.

fishybusiness

Just a note for those recommended trying the drive on another PC. If it formatted HFS+ as is recommended by Disk Utility, plugging in to a PC won't work, the file system is not native to Windows.

If the data is valuable, and you are prepared to pay, I would contact a recovery specialist. A failing drive, when messed about with by amateurs could end up being completely dead.

googler

fishybusiness wrote: »

Just a note for those recommended trying the drive on another PC. If it formatted HFS+ as is recommended by Disk Utility, plugging in to a PC won't work, the file system is not native to Windows.

Given the symptoms the OP described, it could have been formatted from a Windoze machine, hence isn't recognised by the Mac, so the suggestion of trying it with various (PC & Mac) machines still holds.

agrinnall

We're all making guesses based on insufficient information here.

OP, is the drive one you have previously been using successfully with your Macbook? Or has it been used with a different computer (if so, what computer) and you are only now trying to access it from the Macbook?

fishybusiness

We're all making guesses based on insufficient information here.

Totally agree. Everyone knows best with a possible failing drive.....when in actual fact very few of us do.