[barbarian]

I have seen several people with OS X who have had partion maps on external firewire drives destroyed... and now it has happened to me. 200 gig backup drive simply shows up as not having OS X (or partitions). With the standard disk utility this leaves me with one option-reformat which obviously sucks.

I know diskwarrior does not repair partion maps (in fact a partion map is one of the requirements)... can any of the other OS X tools attempt to handle this problem or do I have to use an expensive drive repair place to get my data back (this is what my friends did with great success, but it cost almost as much as a new computer.

I know the mantra about backing up. I do it religiously, but I specifically bought this drive because I was running out of space and wanted to back up. I copied everything onto it and was waiting for my new large internal drive...

[ReggieX]

When one of my Maxtor's partition maps bit the dust, I used Data Rescue 3 in OS 9, and it managed to grab everything off the 2nd partition (if I hadn't try to reformat it, I probably could have gotten everything of the first partition too). There's an OS X version, but thank goodness haven't had the need for it yet.

There's a story on MacFixit (I think) recently about permissions problems and external FireWire drives. Basically, the permissions in the system's /Volumes/ directory gets messed up, and the system can't mount a new drive.

Don't know if that'll help you any, but always try what you can before shipping it off to a data recovery place, they're very expensive, and the solution may be as simple as a $30 shareware app like Data Rescue or a free one like repairing permissions on the boot drive with Disk Utility.

[barbarian]

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I tried Diskwarrior... doesn't work with f@&ked partion maps.

I tried Norton. Just didn't work at all. Didn't even register the disk.

Then I read your post and tried Data Rescue X and it recovered all the important data (word documents, iphoto library, and about 400 of my ripped CDs)... well worth the $89 as the data recovery place was going to charge some outrageous sum that would have added up to almost $1000. Anyway I can't say enough good things about this program. I actually recovered about 90% of the files from my drive with the bad partition map and then I dug up an old IDE drive that was just messed up (makes weird noises)... amazingly I was able to recover a good portion of that drive as well. Anyway I'm a convert. I feel like this program should get more play... Norton and even disk warrior are for the birds in comparison.

As an addendum, When I realized data rescue would work, but that I didn't have enough space to transfer everything to, I got frustrated with my old home computer and all it's problems and went out and bought a brand new 1.8 G5 with 2 big HDs. So I went from having no data and a way too old 500mhz G4 to a G5 with a cinema display, all my old info, and room to spare.

Anyway you totally made my day and this was just the kick in the butt I needed to pay the big bucks for my G5.

[Sarc]

Originally posted by barbarian:

As an addendum, When I realized data rescue would work, but that I didn't have enough space to transfer everything to, I got frustrated with my old home computer and all it's problems and went out and bought a brand new 1.8 G5 with 2 big HDs. So I went from having no data and a way too old 500mhz G4 to a G5 with a cinema display, all my old info, and room to spare.

Anyway you totally made my day!

must ... fight ... envy
ahh well

****ER !

[ReggieX]

Glad I could help! Also jealous of the G5.

I couldn't praise Data Rescue enough when I had my drive crap out on me. I even wrote to the author to find out if he was still supporting it before I tried it, and he wrote back in a few hours saying that he was. So that was that!

Meanwhile, my own backup strategy is on hold while I wait for my damn Pioneer A05 to come back from the shop.